DOMINIQUE WHITE

Working with discarded sails, forged iron, burnt mahogany, kaolin clay, sisal, raffia, and cowrie shells, she creates spectral, physically imposing yet deliberately fragile structures that evoke shipwrecks, dismantled vessels, and subaquatic architectures. White won the ninth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2022–2024), culminating in the solo exhibition Deadweight at Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia. She lives and works in Marseille, France.

Early life and education of Dominique White

Dominique White was born in 1993 in London and grew up in Essex. Her mother’s family roots in Saint Lucia gave her early exposure to Caribbean maritime myths and funerary traditions connected to the sea, experiences that would become foundational to her artistic practice.

White completed a Foundation in Art and Design at Central Saint Martins, London, in 2012, followed by a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 2015. After several years working between London and various residency locations across Europe and South America, she settled in Marseille, where she has been based since 2020.

Dominique White Artworks and Style

Dominique White creates large-scale sculptures and installations from nautical materials and found objects, exploring what she terms ‘the shipwrecked’ — a reflexive state of being that imagines the destruction of the metaphorical slave ship as a path toward emancipation.

Early works and the Stateless, 2016–2019

White’s earliest exhibited works, including The Flag of Nowhere (2017) and Landlocked Prisoner (2018), established her sculptural language of tarred rope, kaolin clay, dried palm, cowrie shells, and iron hooks arranged in precarious, gravity-defying compositions. These works introduced her concept of the ‘Stateless’ — an imagined non-space beyond the nation-state, inhabited by shipwrecked, escaped, and free Black subjects whose existence falls outside governing authority. A pivotal early presentation was the solo Fugitive of the State(less) at VEDA, Florence, in 2019, followed by a commissioned installation at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, curated by Taylor Le Melle. That same year, White won the Roger Pailhas Prize at Art-O-Rama, Marseille, and completed a residency on the island of Favignana, where she submerged works in the Mediterranean and retrieved them, establishing a method of material destruction that would become central to her process.

Hydrarchy and international expansion, 2020–2023

From 2020, White’s sculptures grew larger and more physically forceful, shifting from a language of escape and captivity toward outright rebellion and destruction. She introduced the concept of ‘hydrarchy from below’ — the dismantling of state power through the instruments of the sea — drawing on Detroit techno collective Drexciya’s mythology of underwater nations and the postcolonial maritime theory of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Solo exhibitions followed at UKS, Oslo (Blackness in Democracy’s Graveyard, 2021), VEDA, Florence (Hydra Decapita, 2021–2022), Triangle–Astérides, Marseille (Cinders of the Wreck, 2022), La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2022–2023), and Kunsthalle Münster (When Disaster Strikes, 2023–2024). White also presented a solo booth at Art Basel Statements in 2022 and was included in Afterimage at MAXXI L’Aquila (2022–2023).

Max Mara Art Prize and ‘Deadweight’, 2023–2024

In 2023, White was announced as the winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, awarded jointly by Max Mara, Whitechapel Gallery, and Collezione Maramotti. The six-month Italian residency took her to Agnone, Palermo, Genoa, Milan, and Todi, where she studied bronze casting at the Pontificia Fonderia di Campane Marinelli — a family foundry operating for over a thousand years — and researched the Mediterranean slave trade with scholars including historian Giovanna Fiume at the University of Palermo. The resulting exhibition, Deadweight, comprised four new large-scale sculptures forged from high volatile charcoal, iron, sisal, raffia, and driftwood, presented at Whitechapel Gallery, London (July–September 2024) and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (October 2024 – February 2025). The title derives from the nautical term for the total weight a ship carries, which determines its ability to float; White deliberately inverts this concept, offering disruption as opposed to stability.

In 2024, White also presented the duo exhibition Sargasso Sea with Alberta Whittle at ICA Philadelphia, and Destruction of Order at VEDA, Florence.

Current exhibitions and ongoing themes, 2025–2026

In 2025, White presented Cinders of the Wreck as her first exhibition in Ireland, a solo show at VISUAL Carlow that assembled four large sculptures—the Collapsed, the Overthrown, yet ever Insatiable (2022), The Long Emancipation (2022), Can We Be Known Without Being Hunted (2022), and Redemption (2022)—which functioned both individually and as a single installation. The works extend her ongoing engagement with the myth of the Hydra and hydrarchy, recasting the nation-state and its maritime apparatus as the true monster while using weathered nautical materials—frayed rope, rusted metal, null sails, burnt mahogany and disintegrating kaolin clay—to evoke shipwreck, decay, and the sea as a boundless, borderless archive of Black histories and speculative futures. In the same year she showed alongside Lewis Hammond in condolondon at Arcadia Missa, London, where an accompanying text by Taylor Le Melle framed her sculptures as ‘dragon-coded’, insisting on destruction as a necessary methodology and staging an uneasy dialogue between White’s refusal of legibility and Hammond’s more intimate, painterly ‘wriggle’.

In early 2026, White’s solo exhibition All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre at Kunsthalle Basel marked a further consolidation of her concerns with maritime mythologies of the Black diaspora, abolition, and the anticipated collapse of imperial structures, extending the narrative of wreckage and revolt developed in earlier projects such as Destruction of Order at VEDA, Florence. This institutional solo show foregrounds the figure of the ‘Stateless’ as a projected Black futurity ‘that hasn’t yet happened, but must’, linking the hydra-headed ruins of Cinders of the Wreck to a more overtly prophetic, world-ending register. Across these exhibitions, White’s practice shifts from evoking submerged histories toward articulating a speculative politics of refusal and insurrection, while her continued representation by VEDA and presentations at Artissima and Paris Internationale in 2024 situate this evolving sculptural language firmly within an international institutional and market context.

Exhibitions of Dominique White

Dominique White has exhibited at institutions, biennales, and contemporary art galleries across Europe and the Americas.

Select solo exhibitions

• 2026 – All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre, CIRCOLO, Italy
• 2025 – Cinders of the Wreck, Visual Carlow, Carlow, Ireland
• 2024–2025 – Deadweight, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy
• 2024 – Deadweight, Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom
• 2024 – Destruction of Order, VEDA, Florence, Italy
• 2023–2024 – When Disaster Strikes, Kunsthalle Münster, Germany
• 2022–2023 – May You Break Free and Outlive Your Enemy, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain
• 2022 – Cinders of the Wreck, Triangle–Astérides, Marseille, France
• 2022 – Art Basel Statements (solo presentation with VEDA), Basel, Switzerland
• 2021–2022 – Hydra Decapita, VEDA, Florence, Italy
• 2021 – Blackness in Democracy’s Graveyard, UKS – Young Artists’ Society, Oslo, Norway
• 2019 – Fugitive of the State(less), VEDA, Florence, Italy

Select group and duo exhibitions

• 2025 – condolondon: Lewis Hammond and Dominique White, arcadia missa, London, United Kingdom (duo exhibition)
• 2024–2025 – La Haute Note Jaune, Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, France
• 2024–2025 – AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS: Works from the Enea Righi Collection, Museion, Bolzano, Italy
• 2024–ongoing – Sous L’Azur, artexplora, France (travelling exhibition)
• 2023–2024 – Phantom Sculpture, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, United Kingdom
• 2022–2023 – Afterimage, MAXXI L’Aquila, Italy
• 2022 – Love, Bold Tendencies, London, United Kingdom
• 2021–2026 – Techno Worlds, touring exhibition organised by Goethe-Institut, including Art Quarter Budapest and other venues
• 2020–2021 – Possédé·e·s, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier, France

Residencies

• 2023 – Max Mara Art Prize residency (Agnone, Palermo, Genoa, Milan, Todi, Italy)
• 2021 – La Becque, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland
• 2020–2021 – Triangle France–Astérides, Marseille
• 2020 – Triangle Network Fellowship: Sagrada Mercancía, Santiago, Chile
• 2019 – Curva Blu, Favignana, Italy
• 2018 – Formerly Called, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge

Dominique White FAQs

Ocula | 2026