Maud Whatley - Dog Park

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 revel in ambiguity and slowness, favouring processes that resist instant legibility in favour of something stranger and more bodily.

Dog Park is Maud Whatley’s most ambitious drawing to date, an expansive hand-drawn collage developed over three months. Drawing from cinema, literature, and art, the work explores the erotic undertones and social choreography embedded in human-dog relationships, using the literal and metaphorical space of the dog park as a stage for probing ideas of power, leisure, dominance, and desire. With deadpan humour and forensic precision, Whatley assembles visual fragments, from a 1998 rom-com about dog-walk-fuelled romance to Sylvester Stallone’s tattoo of his beloved dog, presenting them like evidence of cultural absurdities and emotional entanglements. The piece balances sincerity with satire, confronting the viewer with the strange intimacy, repression, and occasional ridiculousness of our relationships with animals, all rendered in coloured pencil with a deliberately transparent collage aesthetic that embraces both tenderness and discomfort.

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