Dominique White

Interview by Jessica Lynne

Before I met Dominique White last fall during the Loophole of Retreat: Venice convening, her work had already been tumbling in my mind. In various conversations, the artist Rhea Dillon had spent months ruminating with me about the expanse of White’s practice; she was always reminding me that the next time I found myself in Europe, I needed to figure out how to visit White’s studio. I love the way this turned into a kind of foreshadowing, because I soon did find myself in Europe (though not where White’s studio is located), surrounded by many artists who were discussing the breadth of their work. And suddenly, during a lunch break at the convening, I found myself smiling at White as we were formally introduced.

The conditions of that convening were such that we did not have much time to talk one-on-one, but I knew that when the moment presented itself, I would be eager to speak with her about her relationship to water and mythmaking and maps and Black life. White creates sculptures—living and breathing forms, as she refers to them in the interview that follows—that push the limits of scale. Her material choices, which speak to the conditions and histories of the nautical industry, challenge presumptions of function while creating dream portals for a world otherwise. In our conversation, on the occasion of White being awarded the 2022 Foundwork Artist Prize, we discuss what guides her artistic relationship with the sea, the usefulness of revenge, and agency—both for herself and for the forms that she creates.

Jessica Lynne (JL): In an interview with Ellie Barrett, you offered this language as a way of defining, in part, the aim of your work: "I've situated it, the new world, and the sea as an abstract figure in a tangible space." I want to know if we could begin here and talk about your approaches to world-making in this way. What impulses bring you to the sea, the water, and the nautical?

Dominique White (DW): Initially, it was a rejection of Afrofuturism as positioned in space because that feels less tangible—imagining a Black colony or a Black planet—now that we're colonizing space.

I wanted to look at what we know and yet, the sea is so vast—its histories and myths. The way that time, borders, and geographies become irrelevant at sea was what interested me. Then I became very interested in, for example, Christina Sharpe's readings of water and residence time. I became interested in the idea that anything is possible at sea, and the blurring between the realms of the spiritual and the living. This is also the site where imperialism and capitalism, essentially, were born. Without ships and the sea, we wouldn't have the society that we live in. I most likely wouldn't have grown up in the UK.

It's an approach to world-making and a rejection of land. I guess this is why I end up circling back to the sea, or circling back to this unknown realm. I mean, there's that saying that we know more about space than the sea. It’s this magical, mystical place that we're terrified of at the same time.

"I became interested in the idea that anything is possible at sea, and the blurring between the realms of the spiritual and the living. This is also the site where imperialism and capitalism, essentially, were born. Without ships and the sea, we wouldn't have the society that we live in. I most likely wouldn't have grown up in the UK."

JL: What does it mean to turn our attention to the unknowns within a site that we presume ourselves to know, in a way? I appreciate the function of the shipwreck in your work to this end: both the literal catastrophe and conceptual premise. As someone like Sharpe teaches, for example, the shipwreck remains the site of displacement and death. In your work, it also occupies a speculative valence. How has your relationship to this ground of the shipwreck changed over time? Are there any facets of this conceit, as you understand it and offer to us, that you have been revising or repositioning as you work with it within your practice?

DW: It has definitely mutated over the past four or so years. Initially, this main chapter of my research came from a place of mourning. I experienced quite a lot of death in 2017 and 2018. I was looking for a means of peace. In works from 2019 to 2020, there was always a sense of limbo, between capture and escape. Then, I'd say it moved a little bit more into a revenge tone, perhaps. Since 2020, there has been a shift towards actively destroying things, or dragging things down, or eating away at their captors. That's why I work with very particular materials or very particular techniques because I like this idea of the works having some form of autonomy. Every time you show them, they change a little bit, or they disintegrate a little bit. The iron changes color or sometimes the weight balance changes, so sometimes they swing and you can't get them to stop. I sometimes don't even call them works, I'd probably call them bodies or entities. It really feels like they're almost living.

JL: Within the effort of autonomy that you hope to infuse these sculptures with, what new language do they offer to you, the materials themselves, as your thinking and revising continues?

DW: Working with these particular materials in the way that I do is often a battle. Of course, everything is so volatile, even the kaolin clay because it is just quite literally mixed with water. Everything has this element of, as I said, agency, but it really does mean almost having a conversation or finding the middle ground with the material in the process of making it.

"I work with very particular materials or very particular techniques because I like this idea of the works having some form of autonomy. Every time you show them, they change a little bit, or they disintegrate a little bit. The iron changes color or sometimes the weight balance changes, so sometimes they swing and you can't get them to stop. I sometimes don't even call them works, I'd probably call them bodies or entities. It really feels like they're almost living."

May you break free and outlive your enemy, 2021

Cast iron, forged iron, sisal, kaolin clay, null sails, sisal. Photo: Flavio Pescatori.

Courtesy VEDA Firenze and the artist.

JL: Could you speak more about the function of anger throughout your work? You didn't use the word anger—you said revenge—but I am curious about what it opens up for you in the day-to-day context of your studio, and what it might open up for someone experiencing these sculptures.

DW: We're always told that things will change or that things will be reformed. Or, if you protest now for your children, that things will be different. But the reality I find is that we're just stuck in this mutating cycle, so that the problems that we have now are only slightly different from those of our parents. That's why it's more about revenge, as opposed to being like, "We're just going to leave this planet and go somewhere else." I'm like, "Actually, I can't give you peace. I have to destroy everything, so I know that you're not going to come bother us again.”

If we fly off to, I don't know, the moon or something, you're going to come follow us, and colonize the moon, and it's still history repeating itself in a different context. In this future, I don't want any possibility of history chasing us. That's why it's revenge. That's why it definitely does come from a place of anger because if I have to keep repeating the same life over and over again, if I'm doomed to an eternity of this shit, I am going to be pissed.

The works themselves are so delicate but solid at the same time. They're full of so many juxtapositions. I purposely unpick all of the rope and then reweave it back into a net, but it means it will start to snap in places as the tension arrives. And, sometimes, when I'm producing, the work will just destroy itself, and then I have to reconfigure it. But I purposely push it to that extreme. It'll be too heavy, and I know it's too heavy. I can hear it. You can hear it stretch until it finds a happy moment within that tension.

I don't think you get it from the documentation, but there's a lot of tension in the space mostly due to the works’ size. I really hate working with the language of exhibitions. I despise the idea of putting my work all behind plexiglass or having a rope to protect the viewer. Whenever that comes up in a discussion with the curator, I'm instantly incensed, because I want there to be this tension. I want there to be consequences within the space. I always like this power dynamic to be in favor of these entities.

If you give me a space that's 15 meters tall, I'm going to make a beast that is so towering and terrifying that you don't need any of these barriers. You're going to be stuck to the wall.

"I really hate working with the language of exhibitions. I despise the idea of putting my work all behind plexiglass or having a rope to protect the viewer. Whenever that comes up in a discussion with the curator, I'm instantly incensed, because I want there to be this tension. I want there to be consequences within the space."

A fugitive you cannot find a record for is the most successful fugitive of all, 2021

Mahogany, cast iron. Photo: Flavio Pescatori.

Courtesy VEDA Firenze and the artist.

Redemption, 2022

Burnt mahogany, cast iron, forged iron, damaged rope. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

Courtesy Triangle - Astérides, VEDA Firenze, and the artist.

JL: That speaks to the livingness of the works, as you say. They are breathing and living with us. To this end, is there such a thing, for you, as a failed sculpture? How do you know when these entities that are living and breathing are doing what you want them to do on a material or conceptual level?

DW: I never see them as mistakes, but more as lessons. Sometimes they are literally impossible to show because maybe the mixture's been wrong, and it's disintegrated into nothing, and I can't physically move them. I work intensely, and things do go wrong, but then I have to take a moment and ask, "Why did that happen? And how do we then move forward?" So, unless something drastic has happened, I'd like to always think that I'll come back to it to some extent. It's a negotiation or a battle, as opposed to me forcing it. I think the more you force the materials to do something, the more reluctant they become in this conversation.

JL: Do you find that you're given curatorial autonomy as you make those negotiations?

DW: If it's in a group exhibition, for example, and they're like "We want a new work, but this has to be the space. We have to transport it, and we don't want to spend that much money," then that becomes a whole discussion. I don't like the constraints of commissions. If I'm going to do a commission, it's very much on my terms. It does work. It’s just not as straightforward as the work is so explosive.

JL: I asked about how frequently this happens because I imagine that it should be inevitable that the sculptures will always have the space they need. I'm not a curator, so I say, "Oh, of course," whereas a curator says, "You can have this box."

DW: I don't want the box.

JL: Broadly, where would you like to go next in your work? And who are the people, voices, texts that are leading you?

DW: In the past couple months, I've been reading a lot of Katherine McKittrick.

JL: Dear Science?

DW: Yeah, such a good book. There's this passage in Dear Science in which McKittrick is talking about deadweight tonnage which really fascinated me. I love nautical terms for how explicit they are in their origins. It's funny because “deadweight tonnage” doesn't translate easily, I've come to realize. It's only in English that the translation is so abrupt and so violent. That idea is influencing the next year and half of the works that I'll be producing.

I can't talk about it much now, but I am thinking about confinement to the ship with no means of escape. There’ve been many attempts to jump overboard but then you're recaptured again. Does that mean the only means of escape is to destroy the ship from within? It's to become so demonic or so volatile as a unit that you forcefully sink the ship; you force it to destroy itself. That's how I'm interpreting deadweight. Or how that term can be used in favor of destruction, or in favor of, like I said, building worlds.

There's also a passage in The Black Shoals by Tiffany Lethabo King where she’s talking about a map that they found in the Library of Congress. It's a map of indigo farming. And they were saying that the way that it's been folded in this box means that the Black figures that are on this map have started to replicate themselves in places that they couldn't have been, or that they shouldn't have been.

For me, I'll use the idea of this volatility, or this demonic quality that Blackness has. This idea that it can replicate and expand. I'm going back to cartography again. This understanding of being contained. I guess that's what it boils down to: different understandings of breaking from the container or existing outside of it.

"There’ve been many attempts to jump overboard but then you're recaptured again. Does that mean the only means of escape is to destroy the ship from within? It's to become so demonic or so volatile as a unit that you forcefully sink the ship; you force it to destroy itself."

Land, Nation-State, Empire, 2022

Mahogany, charred mahogany, forged iron, raffia, kaolin clay, null sails.

Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, VEDA, and the artist.

Zero Is My Country, 2021

Null sails, kaolin clay, cowrie shells, iron, mahogany, raffia, and sisal.

Photo: Vegard Kleven.

Courtesy VEDA Firenze, UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund / Young Artists’ Society), and the artist.

JL: The word that's coming to my mind, based on what you've described, is mutiny. There is a record of us having taken up mutiny as a strategy in many different instances throughout the long arc of Black histories. That mutiny becomes a way of remaining undisciplined, of remaining beyond the container.

I am thinking, too, of the recently discovered schooner, Clotilda, that last known ship that carried enslaved Africans to the now US—Alabama specifically. It's very interesting to think about what you as an artist offer to an understanding of the sea—the sea as a site of possibility—as historians, biologists, and anthropologists are also making their way into the sea (again). I'm looking forward to what that will mean and the conversations that we'll have around it. There's so much that feels very timely about your work in this sense.

DW: Me too. It's fascinating how the sea has that ability to reveal and hide a lot of history, or to distort things. I find the deep sea fucking fascinating.

JL: I want to read you something and then get your response to it. I'm going to read from page 212 of Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). "An oral ruttier is a long poem containing navigational instructions which sailors learned by heart and recited from memory. The poem contained the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavor of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one's way at sea. Perhaps, too, the reflection and texture of the sea bed, also, the sight of the birds, the direction of their flight. This and an instrument called a Kamal which measured the altitude of stars from the horizon.” I wonder what your first impressions of that are, before I ask a very poignant question.

Ruttier for the Absent, 2019

Null sail, sisal, kaolin clay, worn rope, destroyed palm, iron, raffia, residue from the Mediterranean.

Photo credit: Ilaria Orsini.

Courtesy VEDA Firenze, INCURVA, and the artist.

DW: I love that passage so much. I've explored it a couple of times because I love this idea of a rejection of conventional cartography. Magical. That passage actually influenced a piece from 2019. It's called Ruttier for the Absent and was first staged off the coast of Sicily at the site of a defunct lighthouse. That's where this idea of a rejection of conventional ways of finding a home, or of finding danger, was spurred.

This was a moment in Italy when I think they had just passed a law through which it became illegal to help migrants at sea. It became a moment when boats from the military, or even fishing boats, were watching people die. For me, the work became a love letter to those who were being left to die at sea.

I feel that Brand speaks to the way that I work, but also the way people receive my work. I always have two very opposing experiences. Sometimes people say, "I really can't be in that space." And it's usually quite telling which demographics say which. They find it really beautiful, but they find it really violent and too confrontational.

Then there's another demographic that says, "I've sat with your work for hours and I find it really peaceful.” I feel like that demographic is the one who I actually want the work to be made for, or who I make work for, if it's outside of myself. I want it to be a weird, violent respite. I want there to be the sentiment that we are thinking of other ways to live and to survive. That you can dream and that you can imagine beyond.

Jessica Lynne

Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic.