Artist Dominique White’s Submerged Ghosts Have Surfaced

We must imagine four monumental sculptures, straight out of the depths of the sea, like so many imaginary vestiges. Here, we see torn sails, harpooned by rusty iron spears. There, amalgamated nautical debris, shredded ropes, driftwood, nets reduced to tatters, which evoke anchors, the hull of a ship, skeletons. In the air floats a smell of sea water.

This body of work by British artist Dominique White is called Deadweight, echoing the expression « deadweight tonnage » (which refers to the maximum load that a ship can carry without sinking). It is also a term born from the abolitionist movement after the massacre of Zong, nom of the slave ship whose crew, in 1781, threw overboard more than a hundred African slaves, on the pretext of a lack of drinking water.

Born in 1993 in Essex, the visual artist, who studied in London at Goldsmiths College and then at Central Saint Martins College, now lives between Marseille and her native region. Her family comes from the “Windrush generation”, immigrants from the British Caribbean who came to work in Great Britain between 1948 and 1971 and found themselves threatened with expulsion.

A six-month residency in Italy

In 2023, the artist won the ninth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. A project created in 2005 by the Italian fashion house in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Collezione Maramotti (the private collection of contemporary art of the founder of Max Mara, Achille Maramotti, who died in 2005, today perpetuated by his children and in particular his son Luigi, at the head of the family business), in Reggio Emilia. This prize aims to support British women artists in their creation, and to give them a spotlight.

Dominique White was thus able to benefit from a six-month residency in Italy, which allowed her to realize an old dream: to sink her sculptures. For four months, they were immersed in the Mediterranean. A gesture that was both physical and poetic, to explore the effect of the sea and time on objects. They were then fished out and transferred to her studio in Todi. Covered in rust, they stank. The metals were oxidized, and elements such as sisal, raffia and driftwood were disintegrating.

To create his sculptures, Dominique White undertook a tour of Italy, from Milan to Palermo via Genoa and Agnone, visiting foundries, shipyards and specialist workshops. “I’m really interested in the artisanal methods of metal manufacturing, even if I like to then divert themshe specifies. I use traditional tools, but I also use my hands a lot. Her works are the result of a lot of handling work; she does not hesitate, for example, to dip elements in acid and transform them with fire.

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