About the work

Dominique White has created a series of unique Cyanotype prints for Whitechapel Gallery on the occasion of Dominique White: Deadweight, Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2 July – 15 September 2024.

The series, Deadweight, blueprint, 2024 relates closely to White’s Whitechapel Gallery exhibition. These ‘blueprints’ are created using the small maquettes for two of the large-scale sculptures featured. The maquette were placed directly onto the paper, the size of the object determining the scale of the print. The artist manipulates the cyanotype process, usually used as a means of replicating information or an object exactly, through disrupting the method and material, to create the unexpected and unique outcomes, running through the series of prints.

The cyanotypes are inspired by studies in the blueprint archives of Genoa University. which contain the mechanical drawings of ships from the 1800s, showing in meticulous detail the mechanics of wooden and metal ships. Also an influence is a passage from Tiffany Lethabo King's book, the Black Shoals, in which the writer describes a map held by Davidson's Archives and Special Collections Division on which there is also a ghostly reproduction of the engraving of the Black bodies processing indigo that appears on the coastline to the west of the legend.  Whilst folded in the storage of the library's drawers, the map's manipulation through pressure, friction, climate, time and its own materiality has caused a doubling of the image. For Lethabo, 'the doubled image of the Black figures engaged in the processing of indigo in the cartouche reproduce, or double, themselves on the map for methodological reasons, as well as to draw attention to the force of Black life'. The shoal, an offshore formation neither categorized as land or sea, exists similarly in a state of multiplicity and transience.

About the artist

Dominique White (UK) weaves together the theories of Black Subjectivity, Afro-pessimism and Hydrarchy (from below) with the nautical myths of Black Diaspora into a term she defines as the Shipwreck(ed); a reflexive verb and state of being. White’s sculptures, or beacons, prophesy the emergence of the Stateless; “a [Black] future that hasn’t yet happened, but must.” (Campt 2017 in Yussof 2018). Dominique White lives between Marseille (FR) and Essex (UK) and she often works nomadically.

Selected exhibitions

Recent solo exhibitions and presentations include: Destruction of Order, VEDA (Florence, Italy, 2024); Dominique White and Alberta Whittle: Sargasso Sea, ICA Philadelphia (Philadelphia, USA 2024); When Disaster Strikes…, Kunsthalle Münster (Münster, Germany 2023-4), May You Break Free and Outlive Your Enemy, La Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain, 2023) and Statements, Art Basel (Basel, Switzerland, 2022). Recent group exhibitions include Afterimage at MAXXI; Aquila (Italy, L’Aquila, 2022-2023); Love at Bold Tendencies (London, UK, 2022); Techno Worlds at Art Quarter Budapest, commissioned by Goethe-Institut (Travelling) (2021-2025). White was awarded the Foundwork Artist Prize of 2022 (US), has received awards from Artangel (UK), the Henry Moore Foundation (UK) in 2020 and the Roger Pailhas Prize (Art-O-Rama, FR) in conjunction with her solo presentation with VEDA in 2019. White was in residency at Sagrada Mercancía (Chile), Triangle France – Astéride (France) and La Becque (Switzerland) in 2020 and 2021.