‘If Wishes Were Thrushes,
Beggars Would Eat Birds’
DCA, Dundee, Scotland
12 September – 08 November 2020
At the heart of this new exhibition is an exploration of particular gardens through characters and stories connected to them. Using installation, photography, film and sound, Whipps explores ideas of cultivated landscapes through wildly different timeframes and personal narratives connected to specific sites and materials.
Installed within the gallery as a choreographed sequence of moving images using both digital and analogue projections, viewers are gently guided through the work by the artist’s voice. This narration gathers together histories and stories from Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Switzerland and Mexico, whilst macro and micro imagery moves from industrial scenes of limestone quarrying and cutting to minute details of leaf veins and organic plant structures.
With this work, Whipps invites us to consider the ways in which people have worked with materials over vast periods of time, whether through practical practices of resource extraction or through wider political frameworks of empire building and colonial thinking.
Photographs ©Ruth Clark
Watch video documentation of the work by Rob Page below:
