On the day of his father’s death in Melbourne, Douglas White came across a dead bat in the same neighbourhood. The animal must have passed just just hours before, everything about it was still perfect. It was the second body the artist had encountered that day, and perhaps that accounts for the deep fascination and wonder he felt for it. He was particularly drawn to the gossamer thin skin of its wings, curiously stretched and wrinkled around their bony architecture, one of which extended across the animal’s face, seemingly shielding it from the light.
Upon returning home White began to encounter echoes of this memory. Discarded banana skins on the streets around his home seemed to hold the same form. He began to collect these skins and fashion them into the memory of this bat, their skins uncannily mirroring the stretches, folds and wrinkles- their curled up ends becoming wings and ears and claws and snouts- each lovingly and delicately rendered. The resulting fragments, combined with faux fur harvested from discarded clothing, become intimate and highly personal reflections on grief. A process of psychological and material displacement, skin standing in for skin, animal standing in for father, a heartfelt and delicate process of reanimation.
These types of material and psychological echoes are central to White’s practice- seeing one form in another, a dreamlike slippage between forms, as if materials are dissatisfied with their given forms. which become a highly personalised form of material processing. The works question how memories are evoked, projected and reprocessed.
