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Lot Essay
Emmi Whitehorse’s Sea Forager II (2024) is a prismatic medley of line and colour, an example of the artist’s celebrated landscape practice rooted in an Indigenous worldview. Spanning more than two metres wide, the work envelops the viewer in a mise-en-scène of flickering light, illuminating the vibrant depths of a submarine world. To create this effect Whitehorse initially applies thick swathes of white paint, which absorb subsequent washes of blue, green, yellow and pink, smoothed into a haze of opalescent light by the artist’s hand. Across the surface Whitehorse introduces intricately delineated flora, molluscs, and abstracted concentric forms evocative of the rings which betray the age of a tree, the ripples of water, or the markings on maps which capture the contours of the natural world. A member of the Navajo Nation, Whitehorse’s practice is embedded in the New Mexico landscape and environment. Following a career of some four decades, in recent years Whitehorse has received broad international acclaim. She was selected for inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale exhibition Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, as well as The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans (2024) a major touring exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut.
Whitehorse’s practice is heavily informed by her indigenous heritage, as a member of the Navajo people, or Diné. As a student at the University of New Mexico, Whitehorse joined the nascent Grey Canyon group of indigenous artists founded by Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith and Conrad House. The perspective of kincentricity, an interdependency between Indigenous people and animate and inanimate life forms and forces, is shared by almost all Indigenous cultures and is central to Whitehorse’s work. Hers is a landscape practice that invokes not only the land and its inhabitants but also traces of light, weather systems, and the emotive qualities of the natural world.
Within Navajo culture the philosophy of Hózhó is also crucial, translated as a beauty achieved through balance. Navajo traditions and practices were passed down to the artist from her grandmother, with whom she spent time as a child tending to the family’s herd of sheep and goats, and assisting in the almost alchemical transformation of wool into yarn, and through a loom into blankets and rugs. Whitehorse reflects that her grandmother would never approach the loom when she was upset, angry or despondent, and that Whitehorse similarly refrains from working in such states. ‘Those feelings and emotions can get transferred into the work and throw things off balance,’ she explains (E. Whitehorse quoted in R. Diaz, ‘Emmi Whitehorse Paints the Harmonies of Her Homelands,’ National Gallery of Art, 25 July 2024).
The artist’s working method reflects this holistic worldview. Whitehorse works horizontally, laying her large grounds on flat tabletops and rotating the support many times as the work advances. In this way there is no obviously correct orientation, just as in many landscapes by Indigenous artists there is no horizon line. The world is not merely reflected in Whitehorse’s practice: it flows through it. Seed pods—suggestive of new life—interlace with the whorls of shells, or with colourful bubble-like trails. In places a confluence of concentric line suggests the iridescent scales of fish, caught in refracted subaqueous light as they progress through a dwelling abundant with abstracted vegetation. Emanating the animism that has informed Whitehorse’s long career, Sea Forager II involves the viewer in an increasingly urgent acknowledgment of humanity’s place within the natural world.
Whitehorse’s practice is heavily informed by her indigenous heritage, as a member of the Navajo people, or Diné. As a student at the University of New Mexico, Whitehorse joined the nascent Grey Canyon group of indigenous artists founded by Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith and Conrad House. The perspective of kincentricity, an interdependency between Indigenous people and animate and inanimate life forms and forces, is shared by almost all Indigenous cultures and is central to Whitehorse’s work. Hers is a landscape practice that invokes not only the land and its inhabitants but also traces of light, weather systems, and the emotive qualities of the natural world.
Within Navajo culture the philosophy of Hózhó is also crucial, translated as a beauty achieved through balance. Navajo traditions and practices were passed down to the artist from her grandmother, with whom she spent time as a child tending to the family’s herd of sheep and goats, and assisting in the almost alchemical transformation of wool into yarn, and through a loom into blankets and rugs. Whitehorse reflects that her grandmother would never approach the loom when she was upset, angry or despondent, and that Whitehorse similarly refrains from working in such states. ‘Those feelings and emotions can get transferred into the work and throw things off balance,’ she explains (E. Whitehorse quoted in R. Diaz, ‘Emmi Whitehorse Paints the Harmonies of Her Homelands,’ National Gallery of Art, 25 July 2024).
The artist’s working method reflects this holistic worldview. Whitehorse works horizontally, laying her large grounds on flat tabletops and rotating the support many times as the work advances. In this way there is no obviously correct orientation, just as in many landscapes by Indigenous artists there is no horizon line. The world is not merely reflected in Whitehorse’s practice: it flows through it. Seed pods—suggestive of new life—interlace with the whorls of shells, or with colourful bubble-like trails. In places a confluence of concentric line suggests the iridescent scales of fish, caught in refracted subaqueous light as they progress through a dwelling abundant with abstracted vegetation. Emanating the animism that has informed Whitehorse’s long career, Sea Forager II involves the viewer in an increasingly urgent acknowledgment of humanity’s place within the natural world.