Douglas White

Description

Douglas White is an artist that takes decaying objects, discarded waste and generally that which we have cast aside as useless or irrelevant and breathes new life into it. From rotten trees, lightning struck pine and exploded tyres, this reinstating of objects that no longer have a specific use, provides us with new frames of poetic reference and a powerfully visceral experience. Using two tonnes of tyres, White describes in an interview with Dazed & Confused magazine how the piece was realised,

"I persuaded Fyffes to ship them here for me and the whole thing became like some demented colonial mission, mirroring the journeys of Victorian botanists who bought the first Para Rubber Tree over to England in 1876."

The title Icarus Palm leads us directly back to the allegorical Greek myth of Icarus, the flying apprentice. Allusions abound when we look at this flayed tree, the fronds resembling burnt wings with their knarled and frayed edges. From a distance, it looks dead, a burnt out carcass, all life vanquished. Sad almost, against the lush greenery of the grounds at Goodwood. Post apocalyptic, other-worldly, it isn't a tree we recognise as such, but yet we are familiar with its form. It's portent seems one of death and destruction, and with climate change currently such a prescient issue, White seems to say, the future is not so bright. Maybe as a civilisation we have flown too close to the sun, in our fervent need to have it all, and our heedless pursuit of wealth at the possible cost of the planet. In my mind it acts a cipher, a repository maybe for our fears, a 21st Century totem to warn.