Scene XV: Antiphony

Matt Carey-Williams, London, Hong Kong and Seoul, January 2026

I: CALL AND RESPONSE

Seen in both juxtaposition and contradistinction, the searching practices of Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King and Harry Whitelock offer fertile ground for their shared – yet deeply personal – explorations into the dynamo of process and how such faculty and format necessarily shapes any patterns or paradigms of narrative in an art form that ordinarily begs determination or realisation of its surface for its viewer, yet, here, deliberately and deliciously offers neither. Gordon-King and Whitelock’s journeys begin with architectures of possibility (if not necessarily narratives as one ordinarily understands them) that are designed and discovered; written and heard; deliberate and accidental and, in many cases, function in and as their hybrid state. These blueprints may be intimate or particular to each artist yet may also be anonymous and found, with both structures of thought and performance commanding of each artist a response. Mark begets mark; sound germinates gesture; matter folds into memory; unknown migrates to known and vice versa. Therein lies the crux of the conversation between these two artists and the antiphony their collaboration creates in this Scene.

Ideas are elastic. They ferment in fluidity, not fixity; wobbling and shimmering when stretched and pulled by artists and both Gordon-King and Whitelock’s practices engage in such a physical interrogation of thought, fuelled by processes that are nimble and poetic enough to respond to the inexorable epistemological flux innate to any schema or intention. Such tributaries of thought and concept certainly nourish the establishment of surface and object, yet, in this conversation, form is ironically arrived at as process responds to the supposed requirements of the ideas it forges and faces. Form shifts with pressure and mood, transforming trajectory into tribulation, defining desire as it destroys design.

So it is that a circularity – a (r)evolution – between paradigm and practice propels these two fascinating, intelligent enterprises, crystallising itself as a kind of call and response. The call can emerge from any number of sources – music, marks, text or textiles – with the response offered in any number of physical and visual ways: painted, drawn, written, collaged, accrued, distressed, layered. It is a notion that offers a specific nexus to ‘scapes of sound as well as to tertiary concerns orbiting patterns of worship and strategy. Feeding off the fluidity and flux of sound, both practices thus offer extended arcs on the nature of dialogue, memory and their endless echo of each other in each other, making manifest an antiphony of muse and mechanics; source and surface; intuition and reflex, cemented by efforts to evince a shared experience, that so energises the currency of Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King and Harry Whitelock’s art.

II: THE MATTER OF MARK AND MATERIAL

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King, A cigarette at dusk, 2025, Oil and distemper on linen, 225 x 140 cm (88 5/8 x 55 1/8 in)

The call – that first scream into the void; the first act of the antiphony to be unveiled – begins with the mark in Gordon-King’s universe. A cigarette at dusk (2025) resounds as a surface grappling with a dialogue entrenched in the polarities of positive and negative. The steeply vertical space appears blocked into four quadrants from which marks emerge, all encroaching towards the painting’s centre where conflict or nexus is inevitable. The upper right is animated by a litany of almost calligraphic, alphabetic marks, that seem to want to communicate beyond the confines of their swift, abstract delineation. Like marks on a wall, noted to record time (which is usually lost), they haunt the upper right of the composition in their repetition, more so because of their ensanguined palette. To the left two figures at a table emerge, executed in distemper and oil. Responding to a text, the figures are acting out a scene in which they converse in a cafe whilst the sun leaves for the day. The red marks that appears next to them only serves to illuminate the afterlives of a conversation, never fully decipherable to anyone not present at the time of the words being uttered.

Below, another energy hums across Gordon-King’s canvas, propelled by a crescent of marks that evince the recording of speech yet are denied any clear registration, even as the red stretches the note, reaching to the next. A soft geometry – a window or doorway, perhaps – pushes this form further out of the pictorial space, simultaneously offering resistance yet confrontation. Marks may appear compartmentalised – speaking their own language, so to speak – but it is the frisson of their dialectical thrust – their inexorable connection; the riffs off each other they generate – that fuels the flow and flux of Gordon-King’s painting. This is achieved in acts of witting and unwitting coalescence, only for such painterly aggregation to emulsify, exhibiting not the blend of two marks into one, but the competition of both as they seek independence from each other. These calls thus empower a myriad of responses, all the result of the artist’s movement, her focus on density, line, speed and intensity – of her body and the pressure she maintains – which all affect any subsequent figural descriptions offered by the deliberately nebulous forms she proffers.

For Gordon-King, the mark is as important to the materialisation of her work as the composition. The two informing each other as constructs are put into place such as distinctly sectioned areas which are then played into with spatial gestures that denote the body or past echoes of movement. Each mark is a call that conjures many synaptic responses – also marks – so that a complex tessellation occurs; one constantly calling and responding until an orchestration is realised. A surface that uncovers dissonance even as it seeks assonance. That desire for a whole that does not deny its parts – a space that celebrates connection even as it interrogates the dialectic that informs it - also speaks to the art of Harry Whitelock. However, it is not the mark that initiates his artistic osmosis. It is with the material itself where the first call is made.

Harry Whitelock, Fixed Interest, 2025, Oil, acrylic, bleach and dye on cotton canvas, used dust sheet and reused tent canvas,200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

Whitelock’s Fix paintings shed a light on the trials the painter endures when immersed in the act of their art. How, when, where, why to paint what the artist paints sits as the vertebrae of Whitelock’s design. These are paintings where the call finds its first voice not just in the arc of the artist’s choices, but in the nature and narrative of the materials employed itself. 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. An oxymoron thus kickstarts Whitelock’s process, one that ponders the ‘Fix’ familiarity of that space with a kind of Frankensteinian otherness drawn out from his manipulation of the tent. 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. So it is that ab initio the materials of Whitelock’s Fixed Interest (2025) serve up a gladiatorial amphitheatre, staging a contest between tributaries of (a)morality, born of impulse, evisceration and emotion. These Fix works thus privilege experience over form; body over geometry; feeling over logic. You feel this visceral drama play out before you as the artist manages the liberation of his materials versus the desire for their composition. Fabric – whether raw or treated – feels rough and loose, yet it issues an elegance at odds with the crudeness of its materiality, found in the painting’s sophisticated take on chromatic contrasts; textural differentiation and that age-old concern of light balancing dark (and vice versa).

Whitelock’s painting arrives with several narratives already baked into the materials he has chosen to use. This is the first call that commands a tally of responses, many of which are material, aesthetic and narratological. 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.

III: THE FLEX OF FLUX

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King, Ascension into something that sits above ears, 2025,Distemper and oil on canvas, 160 x 160 cm (63 x 63 in)(MCW-JSGK-0006)

As response transforms into its own call, the concomitant antiphony it generates becomes increasingly more difficult to disentangle into its component parts. A flexibility of ground – be that structure, surface or syntax – enables Gordon-King’s ideas to congregate then spool away, embracing yet inveighing against the ordinarily-understood boundaries of ground, mark and process. This being the curse yet the blessing of the dialogic state. Gordon-King’s Ascension into something that sits above ears (2025) best exposes the boundaries between drawing and painting: the former issuing an internalised procession of thought and architecture; the latter externalising action. One trying to guide the other only for such attempted graphic coordination to be subsumed into the quicksand of volumetric painting. A dark painted line searches in a swell of jade and taupe tones, attempting to give resolution to a form or figure that never quite achieves concretisation but merely fuels its own agitation. Further amplifying this disciplinary distinction and tension is the fact that Gordon-King deliberately denies the painted ground the hegemony it is ordinarily accustomed to. The lower right corner – barren yet graceful in such restraint - contests both the ground it resists and the line that attempts to activate it. The result telegraphs both the flux of the physical object as a site of constant (self)-interrogation, as well as the flex of the artist’s body as she transmits her painted message. The call is the artist, the response her surface; the flux is the surface, the flex herself.

Harry Whitelock, Fixed Skin, 2025, Oil, acrylic and dye on cotton canvas, used dust sheet and reused tent canvas, 140 x 100 cm (55 1/8 x 39 3/8 in)

Fixed Skin (2025) makes abundantly clear Whitelock’s similar interest in the transgression of line over ground and the ultimate transubstantiation of ground into line. A more animated tapestry of fabric – tighter, denser and issuing a more determined delineation – confronts the viewer. The title already begins to guide us towards Whitelock’s investigation into how his body responds to the material he employs and how his corresponding ideas manipulate not just materials per se but interrogate the notion of materiality- as state and process, as idea and act. This interrogation makes manifest numerous trials of object and subject, flux and flex, and it is within the back-and-forth of such discourse that Whitelock attempts to quell an aesthetic discord by (what he calls) ‘organising’ his compositions. A distillation of material as gesture as corporeal and experiential abbreviation which, in turn, captures some of the beauty of banality as provided by the pedestrian materials employed and the seductive simplicity of his surface. Skin, cut here into fleshy strips and invested with a muscular geometry that evinces the delight of movement yet the agony of dislocation, is offered without any solution to its physical or indexical dilemma. Rather, it is fixed so that it - as surface - can hold itself – as subject – without containment. The flux of Whitelock’s flex is thus calibrated then adumbrated by the fix demanded of his body to give shape to his paintings.

IV: FINDING SOUND

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King,A note in red hangs above the rest, 2025, Oil and distemper on canvas, 100 x 200 cm (39 3/8 x 78 3/4 in)

Sound plays a significant role in both Gordon-King and Whitelock’s enterprises. It presents itself in many forms: music played in the studio whilst the artist paints; music made; ambient sound sourced and recorded; sound that is found. Gordon-King’s A note in red hangs above the rest (2025) offers no specific source of sound (other than the explicit mention of a ‘note’ in its title) yet a musicality of presence dances across the canvas, felt in distempered arabesques that float in, out and through a ground of supple, putty-like geometry. All of which is dominated by a dark block of winey red to the far right of the canvas that seems to control the tempo of the surface (itself amplified by the exaggerated horizontality of the object), energising and reducing with equal force. Whilst one cannot assume a synaesthesia is at play here, Gordon-King’s variety of touch and pressure, and the quick flicks of ideogrammatic line she uses to join passages of her velvety ground, all suggest an aural inspiration here feeds the animation of her painted surface. The ‘note’ is ‘red’ speaks to the moment of rest that this section of the composition offers, distinct from the lines of the larger area that move towards representation.

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King, Playing on a keyboard stained with blackberries, 2025, Distemper on wooden board, piano key, 30 x 21 cm (11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in)

A more specific source of sound inspires Playing on a keyboard stained with blackberries (2025), and it is one that is truly a discovery. Whilst on a walk on the South Downs with her mother, the two came across a piano outside a music school which they promptly played together. The keyboard was, indeed, stained with blackberries. The dark blue ground, already enlivened with gentle striations of distress running down the board like teary rivulets on stained cheeks, is further enlivened by a passage of paint, occupying the central axis of the painting, that becomes increasingly figural the longer you look at it. The painting depicts the sound emitted from the harp like innards of the baby grand and the resonance of the act of making these sounds. Below the painting Gordon-King hangs a piano key, made of wood and Bakelite resin from the piano. So it is that a circularity of moment, presence, narrative, sound and body come together to forge Gordon-King’s painted surface. Sound becomes the vehicle which holds a memory, which is then unlocked as the artist translates it onto their surface, captured with fleeting brio as if trying to remember something that you want to linger with you for longer than is physically possible. Our experience of the painting is, like the memory Gordon-King evokes, broken down into experiential vignettes: the stain; the key; the fleeting, pleasure of making music. Improvisation is key to Gordon-King’s practice- following in the Jazz tradition that asks for its practitioners to have classical training and complete understanding of their instruments nuances and tones before they are able to dismantle and create their own rhythm. In the way that Thelonious Monk operates two opposing beats that come together to form something that sit above the rest, so can painting provide a steadiness of tone in figuration with abstraction providing the intonation of the offbeat.

Harry Whitelock,Fixed Move, 2025-26,Oil, acrylic, used sweater, reused cotton tent canvas, dye, biro and pastel on cotton canvas,23 x 36 cm (9 x 14 1/8 in)

Harry Whitelock, Fixed Body, 2025, Oil, biro pen, charcoal, marker pen, bleach and paper on cotton canvas and reused tent canvas, 41 x 31 cm (16 1/8 x 12 1/4 in)
(MCW-HaW-0001)

Harry Whitelock,Fixed Move, 2025-26,Oil, acrylic, used sweater, reused cotton tent canvas, dye, biro and pastel on cotton canvas,23 x 36 cm (9 x 14 1/8 in)

Harry Whitelock, Fixed Body, 2025, Oil, biro pen, charcoal, marker pen, bleach and paper on cotton canvas and reused tent canvas, 41 x 31 cm (16 1/8 x 12 1/4 in)
(MCW-HaW-0001)

Whitelock’s Fixed Move (2025-26) also provides a fluid nexus between the body – its arrival and departure as both imprint and tributary of signification – and various streams of sound. Here, the previously discussed narrative suffused into his material connects most earnestly with Whitelock’s passion for music. He is a fan of industrial/ electronic music – bands such as Throbbing Gristle, Prurient – and the crackle of that assertive sound chimes neatly with the earnest mark-making that zips across Whitelock’s multi-laminated surface. Tent fabric – again, the shelter most often used by festival-goers – is now layered with one of the artist’s used sweaters, which he has dyed and then further distressed with paint and pastel. This material introduces a distinctly autobiographical element to the painting which, via the dynamic of sound, allows the artist’s narrative to unfold more clearly. Likewise, Fixed Body (2025) sees process now determine how narrative is unveiled so that it is not through the lens of abstraction that we pick out vignettes of sound, memory or matter - informing the artist’s surface as it builds pillars of self - but that abstraction itself becomes the narrative, so that the way we consider painting - as arc and act – speaks to us much in the same way that experience does: essential, intuitive, simple, pared back, instinctive and ever evolving. Whitelock’s effort to distil the figure (and the narratives it embraces) is thus deliberately problematised by the very process that attempts to establish it: what outlines, collapses; what registers, decays. What tries to consciously fix can only – must only – concede to the overwhelming, automatic rhythm of the subliminal.

V: SYNTAX AS SUBSTANCE

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King, 9 different words spoken by Arnold, 2025, Distemper and oil on paper,204 x 216 cm (80 1/4 x 85 in)

Just as sound inspires many trajectories for both Gordon-King and Whitelock’s conceptual enterprises, so too does language percolate into and nurture their work, not functioning textually but, rather, texturally, introducing another experiential dimension to the painted surface that shifts our understanding of it and expose the boundaries we assume govern it. Gordon-King’s 9 different words spoken by Arnold (2025) unveils no specific text across its support, other than the reference to the nine words spoken by someone called Arnold in the painting’s title. Again, Gordon-King’s ground appears lightly delineated into blocks, washed over with diaphanous swathes of cherry-red. Blocks wobble from ground to aperture all too quickly so that a large rectangle to the upper right opens up an alternative, perspectival space to the main stage, pressed up to the very front of the pictorial space and which is occupied primarily by two figures that are enveloped into one other; one erect with arms stretched out; the other seated is a dynamic yet sensitive coupling but one that remains enigmatic given that no words bubble on the picture plane to offer any guidance or morphology as to why this mise-en-scéne unfolds as it does. Clues are offered, however, running like sinus beats across the extreme upper and lower edges. Tight, calligraphic loops offer urgency and momentum to the surface, chiming with the artist’s fleshy palette and the tectonic fracture of her space, indicating the painting’s own pulse. These loops that were once words but have been altered to make unreadable. It is as if they are trying to tell us what Arnold has said – perhaps explaining the performance on the stage by the two clipped figures before us – but cannot. Or will not. Syntax here sits under the skin of the artist’s object, revelling in allusion, not illusion; teasing, not appeasing the viewer. All of which lends added pregnancy and a timelessness to Gordon-King’s narrative, so that, now, the call and response moments that feed her painterly antiphony coagulate into one another so much that it is difficult to know where the narrative begins and ends. If it ever did. If it ever will.

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King
Simmer, 2025,Distemper and oil on canvas, mounted onto linen, 100 x 140.5 cm (39 3/8 x 55 1/4 in)

Gordon-King’s Simmer (2025), however, is more direct in its transformation of syntax into substance. The word ‘simmer’ - like a neon sculpture – shifts physically and epistemologically into material, object and performance. The word is now substantial – its own protagonist and antagonist - resting high up the support and dazzling with a white shimmer on top of a delicate ground that gently dribbles that illumination down the surface in weepy, sleepy trickles. Word has now become mark – the syntactical now visual – but Gordon-King does more than just delineate the word: she paints its meaning. ‘Simmer’ and Simmer– word and object – ferment, if not fume, as text and action. A clever play between various textures of signification thus takes place in this painting; one which adds another layer to the antiphony that speaks to Gordon-King’s practice. The call is the word; the response is the same word, now transformed into mark.

Harry Whitelock, Fixed Present, 2025, Oil, biro pen and charcoal on cotton canvas and reused tent canvas, 31 x 41 cm (12 1/4 x 16 1/8 in)

Whitelock’s work engages with language only in his determined eschewal of it as an alphabet of understanding. He sees the art of painting as one predicated upon an absence of words which, in turn, privileges alternatives to our predetermined understanding of what language is, and what it does. Fixed Present (2025) offers such a lexical alternative, with the shape of text now broiled into emotive marks that function like hieroglyphs. Daubs, scratches, smears, hatches – all these physical gestures become the abstracted marks that communicate the artist’s mood or feelings, fixing his presence so that the flex of his call and the flux of his response fizz constantly into each other. Presence registered as both graphic incarceration and painterly, material escape. I cannot help but, here, hear that famous lyric from Queen and David Bowie’s collaboration, Under Pressure(19801): “It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about / Watching some good friends screaming, ‘Let me out’”. The terror of knowledge that is so ingrained in language now wails not as linear containment but as lateral abandon.

VI: A CIRCULARITY

The saying ‘what goes around comes around’ neatly sums up the dynamo of consequence that lights up Gordon-King and Whitelock’s conversation. Both their fascinating enterprises speak to the echo of memory; the to-and-fro of their dialogue; the journey of discovery, interpretation, re-interpretation and re-discovery that all nourishes the constant calling and responding of and to mark, gesture and material that is their shared antiphony.

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King, Everything and a receipt, 2025Oil and distemper on linen, 100 x 100 cm (39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in)

Gordon-King’s Everything and a receipt (2025) marks a line under such circularity with this haunting painting feeding off itself, offering agency and friction to the calls and responses made by marks, lines, grounds, figures, syntax and materials. The result is a surface that sings with the most fluid improvisation even as it feels beautifully orchestrated. A bowing figure – the fulcrum of the pictorial space – is both interrogated and rooted by a ground of billowing whites and greys. That ground – never fully ‘grounded’ – is itself confronted by a drippy golden orange line that barely mouths the outline of other protagonists. The painted receipt offers, perhaps, the only truly concrete moment (its permanence deliberately near the wispy reading of the word ‘everything’ above it). A moment of phenomenology in a landscape of reverie that makes one appreciate more the delicacy and complexity of the antiphony at play here.

Harry Whitelock, Fixed Memory, 2025Oil, biro pen and charcoal on cotton canvas and reused tent canvas, 155 x 120 cm (61 x 47 1/4 in)

Whitelock’s antiphony also sits in the conversation and confrontation between mark and material; fluidity and fixity; intent and discovery. Fixed Memory (2025) powerfully concludes his exploration into that dynamic, offering a space that bounces between the memories of the artist, his making, the object he has created and those buried deep in the materials he has employed. Intent sits as the call, discovery, its response. Inextricably linked to that dynamic is the power of the error or accident and how that charges a deeper excavation on Whitelock’s part into the fertile soil of mark, ground, painting, collage and meaning. Ultimately it is this unabashed embrace of trial and error, re-trial and better error (to paraphrase Samuel Beckett) that nourishes Whitelock’s process and empowers his complex surfaces, and this is the circularity – from call to response back to call again - that provides the engine for his and Gordon-King’s penetrating, exquisite work and the deeply-considered conversation it provokes about how and what it means and matters to make art.

Matt Carey-Williams
London, Hong Kong and Seoul
12-22 January 2026