Poppy Whatmore London, United Kingdom

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Poppy Whatmore is a visual artist based in London. She studied an MA Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art with an Arts Council Award. She was nominated for the Adrian Carruthers Studio Award and won the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2013 . Selected group shows include, 'A Body A Part', APT gallery, artist and curator; 'Warped Domesticity'. She was selected for Hogchester Arts in 2023.

The installations I create address struggles of lived experience. I am interested in the potential of language as a reflective means to address how we experience the everyday. I explore tensions especially between the public and private. Fragments of memories are woven into material enactments or even a chosen site. These frozen moments include instances of jeopardy, entrapment and concealment, undermined or overwhelmed in outcome.

One consistent theme is weight: both real and psychological. The weight of material relates to the body. I often characterize and animate selected materials into anthropomorphic or zoomorphic arrangements. In Tropic of Cancer, there is a pair of concrete cast boots, connected with a V-shape iron bar, like pin legs. One boot is straddled on top of the desk, and the other poised in step. The work feasibly portrays the conquering of an aftermath of a conquest or a subversive sexual act in an office.

The pieces evoke moments of explosive force, or kinds of resistance. I aim to create work that escapes control. In its precarious nature the work investigates the uncertainty of our age, the interior lives of others and makes plain inequalities – positing new worlds and forms of resistance. My concern with subverting power dynamics and structures, focuses on deconstructing feminine stereotypes. I reconfigure settings from the everyday, often drawing from domestic materials as a tool applied for corrupting systems. In doing this I consider notions of misuse, questioning our reading and framing of objects.

For me, familiar objects connect with memories, in particular, selected conversations. My titles often introduce the content of the work, referencing former dialogues. What people believe in can be revealing: I am intrigued in the myths we create. My favourite baby-sitter told far-fetched tales. Years afterward I understood her stories could not be true, yet I still admired how she kept me spell bound. Say Yes to a New Adventure, is a pair of female high heeled boots carved in foam and wrapped in black tape, standing on a twig bundle propped up high by a found wooden bar. They appear on the edge of a precipice. We are unaware whether these black boots are on top of the world, or about to fall down from a great height

A friend at primary school was a compulsive liar, who told gripping stories beyond the backdrop of the boring. In the work, Deadline, a cascading, vertical row of office wheelie chairs, explodes into an existing office ceiling. The form echoes an office worker potentially trapped in a corner desk burdened by a pending ‘Deadline’, which might appear to push a person to the edge. In Broken Wings, found, reconfigured wooden blinds, are laid out like wings, fixed together in each slat with hinges, imagining the disappointed worker, where fleeting future dreams are beaten down before taking flight

Through my sculptural works, the real and the unreal can meet at different forks in a path. I transform everyday objects as a point of departure to create agency beyond the routine.