Kate Whiteford

Since her last exhibition in 1989, Whiteford has continued to work in a number of different media, showing her great diversity and talent. Her huge version of Sitelines, a drawing in shallow relief, spanned the perimeters of Scotland’s representation at the Venice Biennale in 1990. She has also recently completed a further land drawing, similar in scale to her monumental carving on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, at Wanas in Sweden.

Drawing is fundamental to all of her work – a preoccupation with basic mark-making and its capacity to carry meaning. References to the history of signs and symbols show her concern with the interplay of past and present readings of that symbolic language. Her major concern is to strip the signs and symbols of their immediate cultural references and go back to their essence, both in visual and semantic terms. Her large scale paintings, painted installations and drawings explore the legacy and visual impact of these signs for the present. Her land works, such as the fish on Calton Hill, refer to the monumental land drawings of earlier cultures – but are made with an ironic sense of distance.

Whiteford’s exhibition at Frith Street Gallery will include both her dense, deep charcoal drawings and her – now characteristic -green and red paintings. Each method shows a fundamentally different approach to the same kind of exploration. In the deep black drawings a single image subtly emerges from the dark surround. Her green and red paintings, on the other hand, are optically jarring. They resist central focus and create movement on the margins of vision. By burning the images onto the retina, so that they remain for that instant of closing the eyes, the optical shift can be read as a metaphor for memory.