HARRY WHITELOCK (b.1996, Hull) lives and works in London. He studied Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art (2015-18) and completed the drawing year at the Royal Drawing School, London, in 2019. He completed an MFA (painting) at The Slade School Of Fine Art in 2025.
Artist Statment
At the end of the book Aliens and Anorexia, author Chris Kraus describes a moment of unraveling and transition. “So yes, by that time things were adding up to one of those moments where you can no longer count on any of the mythologies you’ve believed in and you don’t have any new ones to replace them. Things don’t come out, they fall apart.” Our personal mythologies define the way we interact with the world, dictate our social lives, and allow us to create structure out of chaos. But what happens when the mythologies we build fall apart? In moments when narratives disintegrate, we step through curtains that blur perspectives.
Materials resonate like ghosts, They reflect the mythologies we built around our life. Symbols of nostalgia and familiarity, here are brought together with muted, cold colours and translucent layers of paint and image. They are clues. The cut up canvas, with corners that fray like damp wallpaper, are signs of erosion and of anxious repair, frantic remapping of memory and dreams. Abandon and loss linger under the canopy of the tent, markings of a temporary home.
Ghostly faces adorned with ‘corpse paint’ once worn by young lost boys watch on through the tent. Identities held onto from childhood.
Ghosts shake the foundations of belief, if you saw a ghost your whole universe would change.
We see ghosts of old ideas resurfacing in art, a complicated web of social evolutions.
They take the form nostalgic re-imaginings of lost memories, future potentials, and crumbled ideologies. Maybe these ghosts can offer a guiding hand.
Less of the self-righteous certainty of a punk rebellion and more of a lost depression of moral ambiguity.
Art is a temporary resting place, a hill to sit on and survey the world.
Selected Shows
2025
Slade Interim (final year) Exhibition, London, Slade School Of Art, London
‘Moving Principle’, Group show, Arusha Galley, London
Slade Degree Show, Slade School Of Art, London
2024
Slade Interim Exhibition, Slade School Of Art, London
‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, Slade School group show, Slade School Of Art, London
2023
‘Taster’, Coups Contemporary, London
‘Ares’, OHSH Project X Cromwell Place, London
‘Post-Post War’, OHSH Projects, London
2022
A Path Of A Blood Cell, Solo Exhibition, Asylum Chapel, London
A Plot Hatched By Two, Warbling Collective, London
I’ll Be Your Mirror, Paint Talk/Boisdale Gallery, London
Sinking Feeling, Open House Hackney, London
Nothing Happens In A Recognisable Order, Group Show, Jazz Live At The Crypt, London
The alien Inside Us, Group Show, Anderson Contemporary, London
Folding Thresholds, Group Show, DARts London
2021
The John Moores Painting Prize, Liverpool
Sea Change, Gallery 87, Hull
Hung On A Minute, Platform Southwalk, London
With Love 2, Paint Talk, London
2020
In The Woods group show, Peckham, London
2019
The Best Of The Drawing Year, Christie’s London
The Drawing Year End Of Year Exhibition, Royal Drawing School London
Open Studios, Space Studios, Curated by The Drawing Year, London
Greek Street Art Show, Maison Bertaux, London
2018
Edinburgh Collage of Art Degree Show, Illustration, Edinburgh
Just Guts, Bust A Gut, Edinburgh College of Art Gallery space, Edinburgh
2017
A Narrow Fellow In The Grass, Edinburgh College of Art, Gallery Space, Edinburgh
The Grey People, Edinburgh College of Art, Sculpture Court, Edinburgh