“I think I couldn’t not be an artist. I always made things and drew things, compulsively. I just kept heading towards it,” says Scottish artist Kirsty Whiten. Known for her detailed pencil and watercolor drawings and life-sized paintings on canvas, Whiten’s approach to image-making merges a lush sense of spaciousness with provocative, uncanny detail. Physically speaking, Whiten loves to embrace new materials and challenge her working rhythm on the material level. “Solving the problems of a new material gives space for the story in the work to unfold.” Humans and humanity are her subject matter, what often takes the form of figuration, albeit warped and always at the periphery of the real. Probing human behavior, psychology, sexuality and societal mores, her imagery tells stories and delivers deeper meanings around identity construction, gender roles and embodied freedom. “I look for a raw and honest quality, a shameless physicality, a challenge to the viewer,” says Whiten. In a sense, her works lure viewers in with a certain pleasure in looking, therein, Whiten inserts some more difficult or challenging themes to offer her perspective and provoke shifts in our normative ways of thinking about human identity. Working out of her home studio in Fife, Scotland, the artist feels inspired by the beautiful rural landscape with little woods and the beckoning coastline. “I can walk out to the woods or the hill from my door, but I often feel isolated for the company of other artists, and I have learned I need to travel to refresh myself and make these connections.” In this vein, sometimes she finds it challenging to really step out into the world, pushing through introversion to fully and authentically put the work out there. Balancing her creative practice with life as a mother also poses a challenge at times. She finds that it is important “to keep shifting focus to each precious part of my life to care for the whole, and to feed myself with ideas and connections in art.” As a painter, she is prone to long stretches of solitude in the studio, but her recent stint of traveling, including a residency at The Mothership in New York, and a trip to Tromsø in Norway to work with a group of artists led by Marita Isobel Solberg, proved revitalizing in many ways. Coming back home with new inspiration, including experience collaborating with a few New York artists on some ritual performances, turned a new leaf for the artist, who prior to that had made work about rather than engaged within ritual practice. Currently, she’s channeling these new experiences into drawings and paintings, including a collaboration with three artist-mothers and their young ones (Katie Cercone, Jana Astanov and Laura Kimmel). This project, titled ‘mother as an island’ explores the animality of motherhood, “where a woman is the home-place of her baby in a very physical, elemental way. I want to explore the threshold of new mothering, the nature connection in that raw place, and a sense of the sacred,” explains Whiten.
Follow Kirsty on Instagram @kirstywhitenstudio