Artist Stuart Whipps on ‘Isle of Slingers’

Spike Island’s upcoming Isle of Slingers exhibition 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 light – becomes a motif through which Whipps explores the formation of ideas.

Here he is to tell us more about the Spike show.

Where does the title Isle of Slingers come from?
Thomas Hardy’s 1897 novel The Well-Beloved takes place on the Isle of Slingers, which Hardy describes as: “The towering rock (…) a solid and single block of limestone four miles long (…). The sun flashes on infinitely stratified walls of oolite, the melancholy ruins of cancelled cycles.” Hardy’s Isle of Slingers is the small Dorset island of Portland [Portland’s Pulpit Rock, pictured top], whose famous stone has been used for building and sculpting for hundreds of years. This and other materials are key to a number of works in the show.

“Whipps questions how things come to be realised in a certain form and (…) the paradox of attempting this when both ideas and the physical world are in a state of constant flux”. Sounds fascinating. Explain?
I studied photography at a time when analogue materials were very much in use. When you develop a print in the darkroom it goes through three chemical stages: development, stop and the fix. To me, this chemical fixing of an image has always been a key element of the process – and by extension, we can speak metaphorically of fixing a thought, a moment or an idea.

What will visitors to the show experience? For example, will they navigate through a mix of photos, archive materials, objects?
There will be no single route or order to the exhibition: you can move intuitively through the works. At the heart of the show will be a new film: and, in order to see it, you will have to have walked through all of the other works so I guess in that sense the one half of the show acts as a preface to the other. I’m also trying to set up a bit of a push and pull between the film and the static elements of the show.

The show includes work made around a concrete sculpture garden in Mexico, the remnants of the Scottish oil industry, a ballet company from 1933 and the theft of flowers from a garden in North Wales” Eclectic stuff. What unites it all?
All of the work is in some way about monument-building – or, at least, about the giving of form to ideas. A clear example would be the treatments of Welsh slate and Scottish shale, both of which were extracted for different purposes in the nineteenth century. The legacy of these processes informs a number of works in the show. In Wales, the area in which the slate was mined and quarried has always been excluded from Snowdonia National Park despite being geographically within it. In Scotland the huge residual piles of waste, known as bings, have been classified as industrial monuments.

The film at the heart of the exhibition attempts to draw out connections between these seemingly isolated trajectories. What might those connections be?
With the film I’m aiming to reveal more information and create connections, without being overly didactic. It’s important to me that there is enough room in the work for people to create connections that I never intended. It also, very directly, deals with the notion of looking for connections and trying to make things fit together. That perhaps sounds a bit opaque but I don’t want to give too much away!

Stuart Whipps: Isle of Slingers Spike Island, July 9-Sept 18. For more info, visit www.spikeisland.org.uk/events/exhibitions/stuart-whipps-solo-exhibition