The Mysteries: Joanna Whittle

Cactus Moon Studio is delighted to present The Mysteries, an online solo exhibition by Joanna Whittle. Launching on 27th October, the exhibition brings together a new body of paintings in which marquees, shrines and gateways stand deserted in the landscapes, structures caught between habitation and ruin that conceal as much as they reveal.

There’s something eerie about the marquees in The Mysteries. They just stand there, in dank surrounds, uninhabited and silent. You might hesitate before going inside, because, while the pale fabric is rendered in luxuriant ruched folds, the interiors are in darkness, apart from a cryptic red glow. You can imagine people would have been gathering inside in a genial cacophony of voices and movement. But now, its purpose fulfilled, the structure remains - with the surrounding landscape poised to reclaim it from its starring role in a social occasion. What remains here, once everybody has gone home? “What if we try to stay in that place?” Whittle asks.

This is just one of the many questions Whittle’s paintings ask of us. Her landscapes focus on moments between habitation and departure, on landscape as psychological space, material disintegration and degradation, concealment and revelation. And yet across her works, which characteristically evolve through a dense weave of poetry, mystery and enchantment, Whittle leaves us beguiled and discombobulated, despite the calm certainty of her visions. As the artist says: “I’m always returning to facts, to paint, to the thingness of things.” In gazing at deserted, hollowed structures, she charts how, somehow, they acquire the presence of a ruin.

"Paintings represent one moment continually. That they are objects and not ideas is their strength and their limitation” [Christopher Neve, quoted by Joanna Whittle in the catalogue essay for Unquiet Landscapes]

In The Mysteries, we encounter a series of despatches from Whittle’s enchanted imagination, ideas and dreams nurtured by extensive historical and observational practice. In works such as Faintly Falling and Measuring Time (a grey place with nobody in it), tents or marquees take centre stage, frozen in time, transient structures stranded in place, in a state of deterioration they can’t escape. The process of ruin, a source of fascination to the artist, usually associated with solid structures declining over the centuries, is rendered here into sad, sagging fabrics, buffeted by wind and rain, metaphors for our fixed gaze.

Whittle’s interest in tents and marquees as metaphors for ruins was sparked when she volunteered at music festivals, shortly before her father died. The bereavement prompted an especially reflective frame of mind, acutely aware of the poignancy of an empty field, filling with revellers, flourishing and then dying away as people left, returning to a state of empty silence. She recalls one particularly vivid example that inspired the painting that led to The Mysteries - a sole blue marquee standing in mud, its colour unexpectedly vivid against the churned, charnel ground. This work opened up a new vista in Whittle’s mind. “It was this idea that you could suddenly have this vibrancy in the landscape. But at the same time, it’s a dwelling and I’m thinking a lot here about dwellings. What does it mean to dwell in a space, a building or somewhere where you feel you inhabit the earth?”

You might see Whittle’s dreich skies and sodden earth as predictable subject matter for a painter of British landscapes. But for this artist, the potential found in ambiguous weather is a key part of her narratives. Whittle spent parts of her childhood in Jeddah and then the UAE, where she was especially sensitive to urban and desert spaces, and the interstitial zones where one would shade into the other. Today, Whittle can still recall the drama and excitement of heavy rainfall, how she is still, to quote the song, only happy when it rains.

Whittle’s imagination is a kaleidoscopic universe of ideas, questions, discoveries, impulses, poetic references, personal history, mythical tales, landscapes, geologies, dreams. Her references span the dusty suburbs of Middle Eastern cities, Middle England’s brownfield sites and dark German forests, as well as the deep seabeds of art history.

Each painting evolves of the time of its making,” she says. “Despite the detail and seeming realism of the work, they’re constructed from many different sources. I just start with an idea, or a sensation, or even a particular colour that I want to use - and then the painting grows and changes. Again, this is a process of becoming and unbecoming. They are multi-layered, elements emerge and are buried.”

The scope of references and inspirations is broad, surfacing in numerous ways across her practice. For instance, the handling of fabrics in the Redemptive Mysteries paintings carry an Old Master’s dedication and illusory power, effectively bringing the suggestion of a body into a scene where a physical body is absent. In fact, if we follow the development of this series of paintings, we have an illuminating example of how Whittle’s creative process evolves, as she works her way through a parallel series of pieces.

These Redemptive Mysteries paintings began as a reaction to the Soest Altarpiece, fragments of which can now be seen in the Rijksmuseum - several weathered carved-oak sculptures of biblical scenes, from a late-Gothic altarpiece, created around 1475 - 1500. Drawn by the relic’s narratives and raddled physical condition, Whittle set out to make works inspired by it, set against bleak backgrounds that would loom “large in the landscape. It becomes a thing, a monument. And as this process, which is incredibly meticulous, goes on, the mind starts to wander, to imagine...”

Whittle moved from reacting to the altarpiece to pondering its supernatural potential and, from there, alighted on the notion of concealment. She painted fabric draped over the structure and lit upon a Victorian-era supernaturalism, recalling when the nascent art of photography and craze for ‘spiritualism’ collided. By now, it was clear to her that her wooden structure was haunted. Whittle shuttled between two works at broadly the same time, firing ideas between the two - Redemptive Mysteries (Ghosts) and Redemptive Mysteries (When He Failed Her There).

“It almost becomes a sequence,” she recalls of the latter’s evolution. “I removed the figures from the part of the altarpiece I was working on and replaced them with the Eve figure, flipped on the vertical axis. She is alone and gathers the sheet around her. [Now] there was no ghost and Eve is only part of a wooden structure that has been carved, inanimate beyond the woodworm and the rotting and weathering of wood. But then one thinks of crying, or bleeding statues. And the facts of things become blurred again…”

Playing with form to contrast decay with eternal stories is one Whittle characteristic; summoning sheer emotional energy via colour is another. In Nothing Gold Can Stay, her powerful palette surges the painting into life, a debate between meaningful blues and greens. A darkened background sits blankly behind a luminous green tent surrounding an intense blue opening, urging us into the painting. You might feel that these entrances are simultaneously inviting and threatening, but Whittle has a different emphasis. “I think in all the works, there’s a tension between concealing and revealing.” The mystery, the secret, remains unspoken. The colours “gleam like a fishing lure”, and the fragile boundaries between known and unknown make crossing over seem “both possible and almost irresistible”. Looking harder brings us no closer to an answer. The light within continues to gleam, offering no explanation of who put it there or what it illuminates.

Whittle, a voracious reader and thinker, is perpetually interested in passageways, religious and mythological gateways, the possibility of crossing into another state of being, whether the experience of bereavement and loss or the absence of crowds in a now-empty field. This first manifested during her college days when abstraction allowed for the organisation of ideas that would leach over into her subsequent landscapes. Landscapes, to Whittle, represented the spaces and the in-between spaces in which people live, or have lived, and moved on.

Threshold (Fire) presents this proposition with a duller green gateway structure allowing us to look straight through to - well, more of the empty landscape behind. While the promise ends in an apparent anticlimax, it circles around to honour the structure itself. “One can pass through them [the gateways] to nowhere else,” she says. “They become an edifice, or a monument.”

Here, the gateway has also become part of the ground around it. Weeds and twigs lie scattered over the surface, while the deep green fabric might be coloured cloth, moss or staining. Above the entrance, flames inspired by the plastic illuminated flames on gravestones act as an imitation of eternal fire, but with their own finite life.

Illumination - light - is difficult to pin down throughout these works. Whittle resists definition. “Light always becomes a subversive thing in all the works,” she says. “It’s something which can’t be contained, something which transgresses boundaries.”

The three Forest Shrine paintings in the exhibition are more intimate. Whittle uses a vertical setting, so the viewer stands equal to them, facing a shrine, standing proud and tall against the landscape, almost confrontational. “They are not scenic,” Whittle explains. “They almost come out to meet you.” Their ornament and small illuminations ask for attention, making us think of somebody gathering things and arranging them, maybe conducting a ritual. “There is something prickling and uncanny about them,” she says, a statement which sums up the feeling of unexpectedly stumbling upon an object that seems both deeply private and oddly alert to our presence.

Their construction in paint echoes the imagined work of those unseen hands. “Paint accumulates in the same way as branches and twigs are gathered and assembled,” says Whittle. This gives these works an added physical presence which belongs both to the shrine and to the painted object we are looking at. Yet they remain entrenched in the forest, destined at some distant point to fall apart and return to it. Whittle thinks of “a tension of time, of becoming and unbecoming”, and these paintings seem to hold that process still for just long enough for us to recognise it.

Whittle’s pleasure in technical experimentation is especially evident in these paintings - the way she wrangles paint to represent wood, imbues folds of cloth with weight, draws light from surfaces. The ghosts of British Surrealist landscape artists Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash hover here in the drily surreal landscapes, the stark, strange monuments and the chalky ochres, greys and blues of Whittle’s palette.

Poetry enters through the titles, usually after the paintings have evolved. Redemptive Mysteries (When He Failed Her There) draws on Bertha Ten Eyck James’ Eve and Adam, in which the vast story of expulsion from Eden contracts into the fear of being outside at night and reaching for another person. For Whittle, it comes down to “the hurt and the tenderness of being human”.

For all their darkness, there is an unmistakable delight in the care with which these worlds have been made. Their structures may be temporary, their lights destined to go out, but Whittle gives each fold, twig and damaged surface the attention that allows it to become compellingly present. “There is a poetry, a mystery, an enchantment,” she says. Looking at them, you might find yourself moving between those states, drawn towards an ineffable light or maybe recognising a piece of fabric and wondering again who might have left it there.