MAUD WHATLEY

Maud Whatley makes drawings which layer images and motifs taken from art-historical paintings, online archives, her camera roll and google image results. Her work intends to explore some of the politics of looking at things, the unexpected eroticism of placing different ideas in the context of one another and the ways in which the repetitive insistent touches of drawing can be sexy and weird.

Working primarily with coloured pencils, Whatley’s meticulous and tactile mark-making builds a charged visual language that veers between the intimate and the absurd. Her compositions often hover at the edge of recognition, inviting the viewer to question where these images have come from, and what happens when they rub up against one another. This interest in friction - between image sources, textures, or interpretations - sits at the heart of her practice. Her drawings are ambiguous and slow, favouring processes that resist instant legibility in favour of something stranger.

Whatley is based in Margate. She has shown work there at Liminal Gallery (Haunches, 2024, solo), LIMBO (A convenient size for the lap, 2019) and CRATE (Domino, 2018) as well as in London (Entangled, Saatchi Gallery, 2025 and Careless whisper, 2019) and Folkestone (Giggling quietly at the feel of it, 2018). She has spoken at the London Conference of Critical Thought (2018) and published drawings in Hotel magazine (2021).