Harry Whitelock’s paintings arrive with several narratives already baked into the materials he has chosen to use. Whitelock almost always uses tent fabric: tents being those makeshift shelters that offer protection from the elements; privacy from other music festival revellers and yet remain all too often flimsy and fragile. Fabric is ruptured, torn, formed and reformed on a ground of its own manufacture. These cannibalistic slices and rips speak to the body, its folds of skin, vascularity, intimate crevices.

Much as material begins the conversation in Whitelock’s paintings about a crisis yet celebration of making, so does the narrative embedded in the tent fabrics he uses then seep into the responding narrative of the painting as an abstract experience. Material, then marks, then narrative all engender innate responses to text, gesture and subject, in exchange and in symbiosis, so that Whitelock’s surface glows as a kind of shamanic revelation, yet in so doing provides the foundation for structure which, by extension, glues together the narratives both past and present, found and fabricated, lived and imagined. The hierarchy of the mark is here inextricably linked to the matter of the material it gives dimension and life to.