Artist Talk: Stuart Whipps

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Stuart Whipps talks about the disparate narratives that have been brought together for Isle of Slingers, his most comprehensive exhibition to date.

Isle of Slingers draws together multiple strands from the work of the British artist Stuart Whipps in his largest, most comprehensive exhibition to date.

Whipps trained as a photographer and while his work now ranges more widely, the processes and history of photography underpin much of his thinking. Fixing – the photographic process of setting an image, of preventing any further change by exposure to chemicals – here becomes a motif through which Whipps explores the formation of ideas. Throughout the exhibition Whipps questions how things come to be realised in a certain form and points to the paradoxical effort of attempting this when both ideas and the physical world are in a constant state of flux.

The exhibition takes as its starting point and structuring principle three types of stone – Portland stone, slate and shale – colour coding them to guide the viewer through a series of unexpected narratives that the artist has researched for each of them. A mass of archival information, photographs and objects trace these stories, while the film at the heart of the exhibition attempts to draw out connections between these seemingly isolated trajectories.