Octopus

White's Octopus Drawings are remnants of a strange material process. To produce these works he buys an octopus from a fishmarket and removes the ink-sac. He then dips the octopus in its own ink and prints the inked body directly onto blotting paper. Due to the qualities of the ink and the paper, the process records uncanny levels of detail of the animal’s skin, tentacles and suckers, whilst often also generating seemingly abstract visual elements.

Given the contingency of the process, White has little control over the drawing's final form and for each work that is retained and displayed, many are discarded. Accordingly White's Octopus Drawings can be imagined almost as acts of divination, and his method related to various Surrealist traditions of automatic writing or mark making in which forms emerges through chance and the suppression of conscious intentionality.

At the heart of White’s practice lies an engagement with the transformative and the poetically redemptive possibilities of art. He often scavenges discarded, overlooked and forgotten objects and materials, natural and man-made that, through sculptural interventions, both minimal and profound, he imbues with new life and new meanings.