Lois Whitehead: exhibition

Friday, 20 February 2009

There are some things you will never know.. - 2009

There are some things you will never know.. Part of 'Beers Barnes Circus' an exhibition of 4th year work in the Barnes Building, Glasgow. February 2009

The Work started as a take over of an empty space in the building, an office formally occupied by our dearly missed tutor Tanya. I wanted to follow on from what I had created in the shutter space, a small haven, a sense of myself. An entirely different environment from what existed before or anywhere else in the building.

The space transformed from this...

To This...

On of the problems I encountered with this transformation was how to hide the private and confidential files that were left in the space before me. I decided to hide them behind a white curtain. but to also label this as being a curtain that stopped you from viewing the confidential information. I didn't want to be dishonest in the work.

The space fast became like a retreat, with the stress of the installation getting to the other members of the class, my space seemed to be the warm and welcoming escape from all of that. we all had cups of tea, sat in the cosy chairs and had chats.
At the same time I was using the space to make and document my own ideas and thoughts. This created a problem and confusion in the spaces function.

Examples of work made and displayed in the space..

I started to focus on the theme of the private/public and ideas about confidentiality. I was having quite personal conversations with people and hiding some other personal information.
I started making a roll of confessional wallpaper, the pattern was one that I had been drawing repeatedly and taken from my wedding dress that I was using as a possible idea for my public art project. In between each section of the pattern i started writing a couple of short sentences about a personal incident in my life. I chose to order them specifically so that the most personal was at the very top where you wouldn't be easily able to read it and the least was at optimal head height, then the medium towards the bottom.
As the exhibition drew closer I began to panic about the room and its overall effect on the viewer. I felt it needed to change. I took almost everything out. I started to play with the objects that created the most tension. Trying to create a relationship between object and material. Hiding personal and intimate details behind pattern.

This was the result (and what existed for the final exhibition) of that panic..

I wasn't overly happy with the final result of this, but I chalked it down to experience. It was a chance to experiment and try out a few different ideas, And I definitely gained some insight and good ideas for future work, so it wasn't a wasted effort in any way.

Images & Ideas : Lois Whitehead

Thursday, 15 January 2009

Works of None Fiction - 2008

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).