Jack Whitefield finds beauty in desolation and destruction. “Art brings you out of everything,” he says. “I’m not on any bandwagon; this is my zone.”
Words by Martin Holman
Place is important to Jack Whitefield. He grew up in St Ives and, as both a native and an artist, he feels a strong connection with the culture and terrain of West Penwith. That connection is partly innate due to his mother’s family’s roots in Zennor, and partly physical. Introduced to surfing as a three-year-old by a father steeped in the sport who had come to Cornwall in the 1980s from South Africa to find a base for his pastime, from the age of eight until his late 20s Whitefield was in the water every day, keeping up his fitness. Leaving school at 16, he followed the surf life for a decade, travelling to Japan, Indonesia, the Caribbean, North America, Europe and the Mediterranean.
He was also drawn into the burgeoning industry around surfing. With its branded fashion labels, it idealised the lifestyle in a media world of advertising and magazine features. Whitefield, however, was temperamentally resistant to marketing’s demands and Cornwall remained the place he returned to from varied global destinations. Now increasingly recognised as a sharp and creative presence in the south-west’s art scene, his connection with the region has become more intense, fuelling an authenticity of subject and vision expressed in film, photography and drawing with astonishing visual strength.
The link between place and his artwork is not direct. He does not depict specific locations in order to celebrate their appearance. That approach belongs to a romantic tradition with which Whitefield does not identify. Instead, he focuses on the county he knows as a gateway to broader perceptions. Just like the black and white, analogue materiality he works with, his vision is wrapped in stark grittiness untrammelled by established ideas of beauty. As a result, the setting for his diverse output is not distinguished visually by tourist havens and broad vistas. Instead, his work is built upon the properties he prizes in the Cornish landscape: time, culture, nature and a history of toil.
Above all, Cornwall features in his work because that is where Jack Whitefield has chosen to be. A recent body of work titled FURZE, completed in 2021, is the embodiment of that convergence of place and being from which his imagery instinctively springs. Like much of what he makes, the project arose by chance rather than meticulous planning. Walking at Trewey Hill and Zennor through fields of gorse charred by fire, he noticed that his jeans and hands were covered in charcoal marks. The fabric looked scarified by streaks and smudges that crisscrossed in trails of black and grey as if the devastated grassland were writing itself onto his body. He was struck by how rhythms of movement and the gentle contours of the terrain were being transcribed by the needle-like leaves. Kindled into graphic instruments, their reflexive scoring connected him physically and conceptually with the land he lived in.
Aware he was part of the drawing that was taking place, he sought a method of bringing the experience out of the location as more than a memory. He had his trousers, of course, which became one element in a project that can truly be described as immersive. Another was the act of drawing, art’s fundamental technique of inscribing what we see. So Whitefield extended the experience into draping sheets of paper over the scorched branches. The charred embers imprinted that motion onto the surface when pressed into a bush by hand or currents of air. Photography then bound these activities into a third element, recording the continuous unfolding of the phenomenon, adding context with documentary shots, such as of firemen patrolling the smouldering pasture.
Whitefield cannot pinpoint exactly when photography entered his life but he admits that “with surfing, it became an obsession. If I had £10 in my pocket, it went towards art.”. During his first foreign trips, he was given an old SLR camera which he used to record the places he visited and his activities when travelling. The first image that, he says, “I can still look at and appreciate,” was made in 2012, “a clean, six by seven-inch image of a banal landscape in California.” But Whitefield, who has no formal art education, wondered if he was the only person to find such everyday, uncaptivating reality interesting.
Then he recognised an affinity in his outlook with a group of American photographers active in the mid 1970s, which became known as New Topographics. It included Lewis Baltz, whose images Whitefield especially admires. They are notably unemotional, a factual take on the landscape. Turned away from depicting spectacular views of nature, they settle on stark scenes of modern living’s impact on the land and suburban sprawl. With each theme he chose, Baltz worked in series and usually published his photography in books.
By then, the role of imagery – and how a place or person presents to the public – had already left an impression on Whitefield. Of course, there was the constant market-driven lenswork and branding of the surf sodality, from which he naturally recoiled. Urban graffiti and social subcultures had more effect as he toured. Latent, too, were examples from his background, such as his grandmother, Betty Nankervis. An accomplished printmaker with work in public collections, her monochrome etchings of local sites and traditions hung in the house as he grew up.
That awareness could not have emerged in a more perceptive mind. Nonetheless, he asked himself whether the photography he began making could only exist in America. Discovering the legacy of Land Art, the international trend among artists from the 1960s onwards, persuaded him that actual countryside was a subject for serious art that was primarily visual. These artists had renounced the gallery to sculpt the land into earthworks. These they documented in photographs and maps to convey their grandeur, but in a cold and detached way. With his lineage and knowledge, Whitefield had a strong claim on the sites and perceptions of the county, which he declared to be “ my zone”.
“I want to challenge what it’s like to be from here,” Whitefield says. The prevailing image acclaims the coastline, standing stones and the sparkling legacy of its modernist artists. Whitefield’s engagement with local subject matter is, by comparison, hardier, polemical and even tense. He considers RUBBLE (2019) as his first piece of work to exhibit hallmarks of how he apprehends west Cornwall. The photographs constitute a kind of a journal pursuing several strands of thought.
The project consists of a gallery of photographs taken on his iPhone during the refurbishment of his studio, an abandoned barn that had stabled horses. Foremost is the labour of clearing the interior of redundant concrete stalls. RUBBLE assumes an almost sociological angle by pondering the trades people follow. “I am doing this to make art,” Whitefield remembers thinking. “So why do people move stones? I come from a working-class background and the nature of work – both conceptual and physical – is a theme. The land in Cornwall is as much about mining, fishing and manual labour as the monuments, light and scenery.”
All those features converge in the images, sometimes with an ironic humour. As when stones, hammers and a trolley are set to stand upright unaided against the “landscape” of the stone-filled barn, like anti-monuments of the working man or futuristic menhirs. RUBBLE also carves out an imaginative space inside the reality of the barn’s conversion – a place of agency where things happen and changes occur.
Whitefield’s most recent collection, KEUNYSER (2023), builds upon that possibility. Composed again of images that potentially relate a story in photographs, the actions they follow are activated by the artist himself. The title is Cornish for “fuel gatherer”. Whitefield portrays himself handling boulders of sea coal, carrying lumps chest high before rolling, spinning, pushing and rubbing the stones on large sheets of strong, cotton paper laid on the floor in emphatic acts of making their mark.
Emblematic of a different labour are the overalls he wears. While he is shown in the energetic process of making abstract drawings with the raw material, his demeanour conceivably enacts a truer meaning of the title. Sea coal was netted unintentionally by fishermen who carried it ashore for distribution as free fuel. At the same time, the exertion displayed by the artist as he grapples and hauls seems consciously symbolic. Current controversies surround coal’s use whereas once the industry shaped the communities and topography of Cornwall.
Performance is part of Whitefield’s art and informs his choice of content. For him, the body is a point of contact between the work, the viewer and the wider world. “It is easy to hide behind composed photographs of landscapes. I want my work to be more random and spontaneous and to reveal myself more, my feelings about this place, its past and present.”
Thus, he moves beyond reportage to touch deeper themes. His hands enter the picture, participating in what the camera sees; in his films, a glimpse of shoe or trouser slips into frame; and his jeans become drawings in FURZE. Sometimes he transforms his features by reversing the image into negative in a manner that heightens the drama, like a scene from science fiction, a genre he loves.
One of his most poetic works, TOPOLOGY OF A REDHEAD (2024), meditates on how hair whorls naturally from a fixed point, dictating a direction that cannot be opposed. The pattern on a scalp is found on mightier structures, like the planet itself, which is also depicted. An image of winds spiralling mighty natural forces sits next to the elevated view of a vulnerable human head, juxtaposing two dizzyingly diverse spaces within a single frame.
Another thread present throughout his practice is the sheer materiality of images. He is wedded to the weight of things. In keeping with his admiration for the spare aesthetic of the pre-digital New Topographics, he likes to use a medium format, bellows camera. Images are developed in a traditional dark room. His work is usually encountered in print, in books that he produces with pages that are held, handled and turned. He has not often taken part in conventional exhibitions, although his recent large-format drawings with sea coal were featured last year at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol. Fittingly they were displayed alongside an archive chronicling the miners’ strike of 1984-5.
To arrive at the tactile booklet format similar to chapbooks, the popular medium for ephemeral street literature, Whitefield’s photographs undergo several stages of printing. He oversees every phase, from placing images in a sequence, with some facing blank pages, to balancing tones before rasterising prints into scans duplicated on a Risograph machine. This simple technology transfers soy ink to uncoated newsprint (and then often onto the reader’s fingertips). Pages are folded and bound with two staples. “I like the process because it doesn’t look like art. It flattens space and removes any variables of internal depth. It isn’t precious: the result resembles a survey, using maps and graphs. That feels like ‘me’; it’s the feel I’m seeking.” The method is inexpensive and undeniably physical in its effects; published in limited editions, his books instantly become collectable.
When colours appear in his printed work, as in his A2-sized, screenprinted composites of photographs, drawings and text he calls “proposals”, the look is utilitarian, even clumsy, as if the sheet was prepared as a survey or a poster for a protest group. Subjects are speculative: “Mostly they are artworks about the use of land that don’t have to be realised,” he says, citing his chimerical Studies for a Sapphire Pillbox (2022) that visualise the wartime outpost at Land’s End into a frame for the horizon, lit by the setting sun into a blue beacon of hope.
When Whitefield read that red dye was being added to lagoons to deter swimming during lockdown, he ran with that idea. He imagined how an environmental disaster would be mapped if toxic substances were deployed - a premonition, perhaps, of Britain’s sewage-strewn rivers and beaches.
Whether gathering images into booklets or collaging them into a single-sheet proposal, the comparison with a storyboard is inescapable. Whitefield’s narratives are neither straightforward nor predictable. Still pursuing his first ambition to be a film-maker, those properties are present in his films. A project is invariably in development in the background as he works on photography.
His subjects prize his independent angle on making documentaries. Several short films promote English singer-songwriter Sam Fender’s recordings and in 2022 Vans released Arnow, Whitefield’s intimate and well-rounded portrait of Cornish surfer Tom Lowe. Inspired by 1970s American documentarist Les Blank, his almost journalistic capability exudes visual texture and emotional sensibility with a potency rare for the genre.
Now is the moment to know about Whitefield. As he pulls away from the influences that have helped shape him, the acuity of this artist’s independent path becomes sharper. Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, his work honours cultural boundaries, filtering a network of sensations through the mind and spirit of the onlooker. Those impressions connect us to his surroundings, to their present and past, and simultaneously to a world of visualisation with no regional limits. Reproduced by mechanical means into a hyper-state of their own reality, Whitefield’s imagery portrays a human relationship with the land imbued with an abstract intensity formed out of the matter of his own being.
Jack Whitefield’s exhibition takes place at Hweg gallery, Causewayhead, Penzance, 9th August – 14th September 2024. All images © Jack Whitefield.