Lois Whitehead: Works of None Fiction

Works of None Fiction - A collaberative exhibition - Queens Arms, Leeds - 2008

“Works of Non-Fiction” is an exhibition by four young female artists from West-Yorkshire. They have worked, studied and grown-up alongside each other and they have shared their lives at an intimate level. Despite these common origins they have produced a particularly diverse range of work exploring numerous themes and many different media.Jenny Hall’s work seeks to describe “peoples’ relationship with cloth” in personal and historical contexts while Lois Whitehead deals with the immediacy of colours and their acquaintance with emotions. Merry Swarbrick’s photographs are the fallout from challenging situations in which she adopts the paradoxical roles of protagonist and victim and Deborah Britton focuses on the results of domestic violence and they way in which intense moments can linger in and shape our memories. Some topics, however, are present throughout the exhibition: questions concerning barriers between personal experience and public expression and the difficulties that the artists have had relating their private emotions and cherished observatRashid, Overview of Statements from 'Works of None Fiction'

ions to others whilst trying to establish their own distinctive voices.

- Josef Pitt-Rashid, 2008, Overview of statements from 'Works of None Fiction'

Postcard For Exhibition

I am a female artist currently entering my fourth year of study in Environmental Art, at the Glasgow School of Art.Throughout my time there i have aquired an invested interest in colour, seeing it as a form and material to express personal thoughts and feelings. Making my work seems to be a struggle between making what is interesting to me, accessible and interesting to others. In the past, this has led me to performance based work, where i have been able to take an active role in the understanding and explanation of the work. I am currently interested in persuing the idea of a 'colour study', to discover more about peoples interest in colour and colour and what specific colours mean to them.

- Lois Whitehead, 2008, Artist Statement from 'Works of None Fiction'

For this exhibition i was concentrating on trying to identify my reasons for being drawn repeatedly to colour and nature. I had been reading 'Chromophobia' by David Bachelor and had become increasingly more interested with the idea of colour as artificial.
So i started to reflect that maybe the reason i am so drawn to colour, particularly within nature is that it seems to exist as the purest form of colour.
I began to think about how colour becomes 'artificial' and thought about putting natural colours through a process where they become 'man made' and the associations we project onto them start to take over.
Inside the Jars are liquids of colour that were extracted from plants, fruit and vegetables by myself and then sorted into their various colours. The labels that were later attached to them are the most popular associations that people connected with that colour (which were taken from a survey i conducted of a large group of people).