In “Deadweight” (currently on view at London’s Whitechapel Gallery), Dominique White uses fugitive materials to imagine an abstract future. Developed from her winning proposal for the ninth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, the works began to take shape during a six-month residency in Palermo, Genoa, Milan, and Todi, where White worked with researchers in naval and maritime history and the Mediterranean slave trade, as well as experts in traditional and contemporary metalworking techniques.
Though the exhibition takes its title from a nautical term for the total weight a ship can carry while remaining afloat, White alludes to other interpretations, replacing stability with disruption, and an ultimate reckoning with the tipping point. Her four large-scale sculptures—dead reckoning, the swelling enemy, split obliteration, and ineligible for death (all 2024)—embody strength and fragility, poetry and ugly truths, in a manner that sets the viewer on edge. Rusted metal, fragmented driftwood, decaying sisal and raffia, and the lingering scent of seawater all attest to immersion in the depths.
“Deadweight” is a cold, darkly terrifying show that sucks you in and spits you out. And yet, it is not unremittingly bleak. Rather than follow Sun Ra’s idea of Black futurity into outer space, White re-imagines the sea—a space of fluidity and rebellious possibilities—as a site for the future of Black civilization.
Beth Williamson: Where does your fascination with the sea and nautical history come from?
Dominique White: I think it’s always been with me. Most of my memories as a kid are from the Caribbean, in the sea, swimming out to a floating fruit shack off the coast of Saint Lucia. I guess it’s grown over the years, with my interest in my home islands, and the different relationship that the British have with the sea. There is something very spiritual about the sea. It’s terrifying, but peaceful at the same time. It’s a site of extremes. Especially in the Caribbean, it is a beautiful, clear, space; but then, it’s a space of destruction. I love all the stories, myths, and legends of the sea. For me, it’s a site of endless possibilities.
BW: “Deadweight” is described as grappling with ideas of Hydrarchy, Afro-pessimism, and Afrofuturism. How do those concepts weave together in your thinking and practice? Your take on Afrofuturism, for instance, is very different than Sun Ra’s sci-fi utopianism.
DW: I’m always a bit cautious of labeling. Afro-pessimism is the idea of feeling helpless with how society progresses, or how society offers a fractured identity of humanity to Blackness. I’m not completely steeped in pessimism, and that’s where Afrofuturism comes in. Afrofuturism is usually spoken of in relation to outer space. I was introduced to it through the psychedelic jazz movement of the ’60s—it was an incredible idea at the time because of the Space Race and thinking about new realms. In the present day though, we’re talking about colonizing Mars and space tourism, and it has stopped being so fantastical. Meanwhile, the sea has always been a site that you can’t contain or draw borders through, that you can’t really measure. Hydrarchy is a term coined by the poet Richard Brathwaite in the 1630s to denote a sea vessel’s ability to garner power on land. It’s about the advancement of the ship from a simple merchant transport to a force of power, migration, and slavery.
BW: How did your six-month residency in various Italian cities affect your ideas?
DW: I had written a proposal about what I wanted to focus on during the residency, but when I’m doing research, I always go in with a very open mind. I collected all of the references that I encountered, because I never know what will trigger an idea or a thought process. I spent a lot of time in the archives, especially in Genoa and Palermo, rooting through 15th- and 16th-century documents and blueprints of ships, and I embraced everything. That filtered through when I was working in the bronze foundries.
BW: How did that experience impact your use and understanding of materials and techniques, particularly your use of iron and bronze?
DW: I’d never worked with bronze before, so I was a bit curious. But bronze wasn’t the right material for what I wanted to do, or for my kind of practice, because it’s so permanent. It doesn’t really decay; it doesn’t really shift. It is also the material used to immortalize presidents, and something about that language doesn’t really fit within my practice, and so that pushed me back to iron. I was very lucky to work in a foundry in Todi. I was constantly asking how to push the material further. As the residency was coming to an end, we achieved the kind of forms that I thought the works could evolve from, which was great. I always work from sketches, but in this case, it was more traditional, in that we started building models that were to scale, but very loose. I built on the sketches as the models developed, and I understood better how things interacted. Everything kept shifting because there are things that can’t really be calculated, such as how the weight distribution changes as you increase scale.
BW: The individual sculptures in “Deadweight,” especially the swelling enemy and split obliteration, display a tension between force and fragility. They are holding form, but only just, as if at a tipping point where everything is about to fall apart. At the same time, there is a sense of persistence, of holding on. The works suggest shipwrecks, but they also suggest bodies. They are beautiful and poetic, but also ugly reminders of violence. How do you negotiate these different things in a single work?
DW: That’s quite a hard question to grapple with, because I feel that I am a mediator between the materials, as opposed to a solid creator. With these works, how they settled was just organic. The iron isn’t actually going to rip things apart, but it feels that way. They have a fragility to them, but they’re absolutely solid at the same time. They always sit in between two extremes, and that’s how I want the viewer to engage with them.
I like to play with power within object-making. I’m disillusioned by the idea of sculpture being put on plinths or behind Plexiglas. I want to switch that power so you feel as if you have to be put behind Plexiglas, or ushered to the margins of the space, to engage with the work. Within those two particular works, there are references to shipwrecks on the bed of the ocean. Some of the most fascinating, deepest shipwrecks that have been found have had little human contact because if you start to move them, they disintegrate. So, it remains this solid memory. For me, there’s poetry in that.
BW: I’m thinking of a quotation from the philosopher Joy James, who said, “I don’t have the answers, I just raise questions.” Do you feel like that’s what you’re doing with your work? You’re just posing questions and then it’s for the viewer to negotiate them?
DW: Yes, because I don’t want to give solid answers, because I don’t know what they might be. If you ask me what the future looks like, I don’t know. I just know that I have to pose this question of what a future might look like. That’s why the work keeps constantly mutating into different beasts.
BW: The environment that you created at the Whitechapel is very dark, and there is an instability about it as viewers move around the four sculptures. There is a strangeness that slows us down—almost as if walking through water—and a sense of danger. What do you hope people will take away from the experience?
DW: It’s flipping the power dynamic in art spaces. But also, I really enjoy working with the space that I’m given. When the show moves to Collezione Maramotti, it might change again, given the space. The Whitechapel space is Grade 2 listed. There’s no natural light, so it’s about working with the darkness, carving out the space, creating an atmosphere, because the space is as much a part of the exhibition as the work. There is an underwater, almost isolated, feeling, and a coldness falls on the space.
BW: The show is a bodily experience, and making the work, particularly the iron work, must have been a very physical experience as well. Is there anything in particular that you’ve take away from this body of work and the process behind it? Is this something that you think you’ll hang on to and develop?
DW: I think it reinforced the fact that I know my practice is very laborious on my body. I was working with an assistant, because the works are extremely heavy and quite hard to handle. It was very much like a dance or ritual in the studio to get the works to behave and work out the problems. I feel there’s also a development in that I have learned to push the limits of materials, of what forms are possible, of what scale is possible. For an object-maker, that’s really exciting.
Dominique White’s “Deadweight” is on view at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, through September 15, 2024. The exhibition will travel to Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, October 17, 2024, through February 16, 2025.
