Oliver Whitehouse

On Practice

Most of my art, well, I used to love painting, but nowadays I’ve been moving towards photography and film. My most recent artwork was a collage, but I do eventually want to move straight into forms of art where I can use sound and visuals at the same time. When I engage in my art, I often go back to things that have interested me in the past, such as archive images, ancient mythology, or the internet. These are spaces that feel very surreal, and you get moments where they intersect. You are struck with visuals and stories that are powerful and difficult to define. I try my best to put these moments into a visual form.

On Inspiration

 I also draw a lot of my inspiration from old archive photographs, not just because they look really interesting, but because I feel as if the pictures have a sort of quality that speaks to me. The internet is another place where I find inspiration - not just from other artworks, but also from the surreal kind of images that appear while you doom scroll, which inspired a webcomic I made last year. But most of my concepts are framed around my memories and heritage. My mum is Chinese. I visited China for the first time in two years. It really affected me. I guess everything changes, but China is a place where change is just so obvious—it’s all changed so quickly. I’ve started to think about China unconsciously and I draw a lot of my inspiration from this change.

ON “MYTH”

My body of work for this exhibition is called “Myth” and it builds on my previous artwork, which centred around pictures of places and family. Photos and videos of places and people help us remember things, but they also alienate us. I played with this idea by placing images of settings over people to demonstrate how our memory of a place eventually becomes a part of who we are. I wanted to make a film for this exhibition because I had never made one for a gallery before. This film is divided into three different sections: photos, writing, and television. 

“Myth” is inspired by the myth of Meng Po, a woman who lives in the tenth version of Hell, which exists within a sea of twenty different variations of Hell. Meng Po feeds you a soup that wipes you of all your memory. She does this because her husband died before her, and she couldn’t bear the pain of remembering him. Meng Po lives on a bridge where a stone near the bridge records all her past lives. I’m using that concept as a way to branch into photographs, television, and writing, to show how these are the ways in which our lives are recorded. I wanted to edit this to evoke this dreamlike quality, almost like a spoken myth in visual form. I love fusing modern and ancient aesthetics, especially dissecting that contrast between surreal ancient symbols and calligraphy looks in the modern world.

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