The Mitre Owl

Collaborative exhibition with artist Joanna Whittle / Artcade Gallery / July 2021

Ruin (Collage Study) / Ceramic / 2021 / 38cm x 24cm

The Mitre Owl represents a collection made up of objects and original artworks by David Orme and Joanna Whittle as well as artefacts and items from their own treasuries. The exhibition space will become part shop front, part assemblage and part physical inventory and will represent a small corner of a much wider and quite possibly fictional archive. The exhibition will reveal points of collaboration between Orme and Whittle including the production of a limited edition enamel pin. New paintings and ceramics from Whittle will exhibit alongside Orme’s own ceramic works and collages along with other artworks from the collection.

On view at Artcade Gallery, Sheffield from 2nd – 24th July 2021

Between Islands

Exhibition by Joanna Whittle on display at the Harley Gallery from 01.08.2020 – 01.11.2020

Whittle’s exhibition at the Harley Gallery on the Welbeck Estate responded to the Portland Collection and surrounding estate. We made trips to various sites on the estate meeting with curators past and present and an expert on costume. I collaborated with JW, lending support in the display and framing of work.
I also included two works pictured above titled: ‘Nine Marvels (from beyond the Interstitial Passageway)’ & ‘Eight Marvels (from beyond the Interstitial Passageway)’, hand dyed, c-type prints.
The titles were informed by a novel written by Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle titled Blazing World.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blazing_World

My dyed photographs (of collages) catalogue the keepsakes recovered from the Blazing World.

In ‘Between Islands’ [Whittle] explores the relationship between ‘creating worlds’ and ‘creating collections’ and the role curation and display of collections plays in developing narratives- real or imagined.

[Whittle] has produced the paintings, drawings and ceramics on display in response to the landscape of the Welbeck estate and items in The Portland Collection and has displayed these as a collection of artefacts from an imagined world called Do><ia. The project has involved collaboration with artist David Orme, to explore the determinations of display and the decisions made to formalise the fictional into the authentic.

The world described is heavily influenced by the rich fabrics and fine ceramics in The Portland Collection and the secret landscape within the estate- creating islands of silk draped structures, hidden tunnels and overgrown gateways alongside ceramic artefacts from this imagined society.