Colette Whiten

Colette Whiten’s needleworks are compelling pieces, contrasting appropriated, mass-media images of political subjects with the representational force of an explicitly female medium. Black and white photographs drawn from newspapers were transposed onto cloth as embroidered images, painstakingly produced by hand, pixel by pixel, in cross stitch needlepoint. The resulting fabric is draped over a steel plinth or lectern, balancing a sense of lightness and transience with weighty presence. Whereas previous embroidered works considered depictions of power - representing political leaders, exclusively male and typically having already met their downfall - in this series, Whiten draws her imagery from news photos of women from India and the Middle East. In displaying the resulting tapestries over the heavy, freestanding plinths, Whiten traces a political agency that has been historically denied to her subjects and the medium that depicts them.