Michael White’s work appropriates forms from the ‘primitive arts’, Aztec designs and tribal iconography. Uncompromising and unsettling, Michael's work investigates both the sacred, profane and hierarchies of representation. For New Work Scotland Programme Michael made a new series of sculptures. Roughly rendered faces and plaster armatures tipped with lacquered stilettos took on a strangely anthropomorphic appearance, at once reminiscent of carefully carved fertility goddesses and a splattered pavement post-Saturday night. The work provocatively embraced the sacrosanct with the secular, rearranging functional hierarchies and introducing contradictory and deviating elements. These redundant idols aimed to engage with the "hollow iconoclasm" of contemporary society, and raised a critique against a modern age of crumbling and exhausted symbols.
Download the exhibition information here
New Work Scotland Programme was an initiative launched by Collective in 2000. Through an open call, New Work Scotland Programme identified and supported some of the most promising new artists working in Scotland - providing them with the opportunity to create new work and bring it to the attention of a wider public. The 2009 participants were Anna Tanner, Michael White, Rachel Adams, Jennifer Grant, Katharina Kiebacher and PLACE Projects.
New Writing Scotland grew out of New Work Scotland Programme and was initiated in 2004 in collaboration with Edinburgh College of Art's Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies, to promote creative writing about the visual arts coupled with targeted support to the exhibiting artists - providing them with them with their first artists text.
This is an archived programme entry.
