Biography

EDWINA WHITE's fictionalized portraits and whimsical vignettes are often injected with a gentle, wry humor. Her delicate drawings offer a nostalgic sensibility in a most contemporary way. Some works capture the glance and pose of a certain character or the staging of a story, while others project the possibilities of her and our imagination.

Recently, Edwina White’s prenatally-inspired abstract works have bubbled to the surface. Evoking the sweet distraction of new life and new forms, Ms. White’s latest pieces derive from the imagined and the unimaginable, from the invisible and the sublime. They are the stuff of playful invention, embedded in a palette of organic matter, alluding to a retrograde future where mysterious objects float in deoxygenated space. These bold mash-ups of biology and botany -- carefully rendered in swirling strokes of blood vermillion, bile green, vein blue and subcutaneous white -- are the tints of the physical, the shades of both life and decay. The inference takes the viewer on a disconcerting journey through an almost somnambular world as hypnotic as a rush of blood pulsing through the vessels of the ear. These are secretive works that imply inner movement and bodily change. They hint of the unknown and of a far-off promise of spring. Ultimately, they are an intimate portrait of a visceral experience that cannot be directly translated, but that Ms. White has superbly expressed through the visually surreal.
 

From Australia, Edwina White lives and works in New York City. Her art work has been exhibited throughout the US (Kinz Tillou), Australia (Olsen Irwin), the UK and Asia. Her works are included in the collections of the Hayward Gallery (UK), Angela Missoni (IT) and Teresa Heines Kerry (US). Her award winning illustrations have been published in the New York Times, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and profiled in Taschen’s 100 Best Illustrators. Her animations are featured in SEMBENE, an African documentary which premiered at Cannes film festival 2015 and she has been spotted live drawing in performance, with novelist Zadie Smith.