Painter · Spinners Mill, Leigh
The End of the Beginning
The Beginning
A Glimmer
Self Portrait as Saint Sébastien
A Brief Infinity
Surrender
A live performance work placing the artist's body alongside the painted body — using monologue, spoken word and theatre as carriers of narrative, presence and emotional truth.
Large-scale paintings form the visual and emotional architecture of the piece, functioning as environments: spaces in which to be, rather than images at which to look.
The paintings begin with the body — not as subject but as pressure. At large scale in oil, Joe Kiney Whitmore works in the territory where figuration dissolves into something older and less nameable: figures that become landscape, forms that are simultaneously anatomical and cosmological, surfaces under which something moves.
The work is rooted in lived experience — not as subject matter to be illustrated, but as forces that have shaped a particular way of seeing. What interests Kiney Whitmore is the internal life of things: the light inside a vessel, the weight inside a body, the place where suffering and devotion become the same gesture. These are paintings made from the inside of an experience, not observations of it from a distance.
Painting, writing and performance are not separate disciplines but a single inquiry conducted across different materials. The Weight of the Light — a live performance work developed with dramaturg David Viney, producer Martin Green and composer Romain Quessaud — places the artist's body alongside the painted body, both expressing the same tension between presence and dissolution. The large-scale paintings function both as autonomous works and as environments: spaces in which to be, rather than images at which to look.
Joe Kiney Whitmore is based at Spinners Mill, Leigh, Greater Manchester.
Spinners Mill · Leigh, Greater Manchester