On the sweeping manicured grounds of Mount Stuart, a neo-gothic stately home on the Scottish Isle of Bute, sits a most incongruous sight: a bright yellow and green Caribbean chattel house. It’s the creation of Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle, who had originally planned to build a bothy to welcome visitors, recognising that the imposing mansion could pose a barrier.
However, the structure ended up becoming an amalgam of a bothy and chattel house, reflecting her dual heritage. “Bothies are gathering spaces of shelter in the Scottish landscape, but I wanted to imbue it with another island’s history of making spaces,” says Glasgow-based Whittle, who represented Scotland at the 2022 Venice Biennale. “The chattel house is an architecture derived from fugitivity – so if you were seen as a troublemaker and the plantation owner wanted you to flee, you could disassemble your home quickly.”
A self-confessed “maximalist”, the artist has added a further layer into the mix, titling the hut An Assembly or a ting (2024), inspired by the 1950s discovery of a Viking parliament, or “ting”, on Bute. “A ting is a space to think about debates. I wanted to create an alternative space for all sorts of gathering and for conflict resolution, for people to come together and imagine different futures, as well as to think about past wounds,” she says.
Whittle’s work foregrounds themes of healing, anti-blackness and the legacies of transatlantic slavery. Her lyrical show Under the Skin of the Ocean, the Thing Urges Us Up Wild is the result of two years of research on Bute and weaves together ideas around ancestral roots and maritime routes, histories of migration and gathering, thresholds and female waywardness as a form of resistance.
In the entrance hall Whittle’s self-portrait bust Remembering Wildfire (2024) is dedicated to the overlooked Black and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), gracing a pedestal usually occupied by a work of Lewis’s, now on loan to Tate. The younger artist thus places herself in a lineage with Lewis, who achieved international renown in the face of extreme racial persecution, emigrated to Rome, and died in obscurity in London. For Whittle, Lewis’s story encapsulates the resilience of Black women and the social challenges of retaining their identity. “How does one enjoy a feeling of wildness,” she asks, “without having to conform to an expectation of propriety?” This question forms a powerful thread running through the exhibition.
Inside the Marble Hall – where a heady melange of tapestries, columns and stained-glass windows vie for attention – is the centrepiece of the show: a series of sensory sculptural assemblages made from salvaged doors that function as thresholds. While many artists might struggle to take on such a densely decorated environment, Whittle’s vibrant works hold their own. Beneath a vaulted ceiling studded with glass crystal stars, the assemblages are arranged in the formation of the constellation Cassiopeia, the Greek mythological queen punished for her vanity – another example of a supposedly wilful woman falling foul of the patriarchy. These doors (all 2024) suggest magic portals, recalling Doctor Who Tardises or the famous closet in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which led into Narnia.
The first door is decorated with a veve, a religious symbol common to Vodou. Slightly ajar, with a disembodied bronze ear perched on the doorframe and a painting of a shaggy masquerade figure on the reverse, it beckons the visitor to enter. “There’s a feeling of mischief with that,” says Whittle. “I wanted this to be almost like an Anansi trickster figure who’s just left their ear behind as a little token to suggest that they’re still listening.”
Elsewhere, a decrepit door looks like it’s been kicked in. A small bronze foot – perhaps the culprit – seems poised to dance impishly up another, slanted door, in keeping with this trio of works’ title, A knock, a kick and we grapevine.
Two more doors are decorated with tufting, titled Beneath the waves we shape shift (before I was a whale) and (before I was a seal). These depict teeming, exuberant scenes of what might be twisting bodies metamorphosing into tree roots, cavorting seals or whale tails slapping the waves. “When I make the works, I’m remembering the feeling of the body doing these actions,” says Whittle, “the way the water feels when you dive in, you’re breaking the seal that can feel quite solid, moving between the above water world to the below water world.”
Part of the joy of these works is in encountering myriad details such as charms and cowrie shells hand stitched on to the tufting surface, or a snail looping a lazy trail across the wood. Three bells hang at the ready behind a door – waiting to celebrate? Sound an alarm? Turquoise sandbags ballasting the sculptures prompt an uneasy premonition of doom, heightened by yellow-green doorframes that convey a sense of submersion – a nod, maybe, to the River Clyde outside, a waterway associated with Glasgow and transatlantic trade.
On the balcony overlooking the hall, three screen prints evoke the horrors of the Middle Passage through the words split across them: “What Sound Does the Black Atlantic Make?” This richly layered show makes space for remembering cruel fates and watery hauntings, while also conjuring festivity and Carnival. One imagines masked revellers streaming through the house, enlivening it with their carousing, only to vanish at the night’s end through a final, horizontal door titled As above, so below, which lies in a conservatory used for stargazing.
It’s perhaps no surprise that Whittle drew inspiration for the doors from a nearby site of prehistoric standing stones. “For me, they are transmitters and have this potency and knowledge. I don’t know what they were communicating, whether it was to another community or to the stars, or to their gods,” says Whittle. “When you touch them, they have such energy.”
Standing in for ancient monoliths, gateways, barriers and even people, Whittle’s theatrical doors on wheels mark a departure in her practice, enabling her to gesture toward bodily movement in space without involving actual performance. These portals to different worlds invoke multiple perspectives simultaneously. This links back to the idea of gathering and the ting-cum-chattel house-cum-bothy, where visitors are invited to relax, debate and heal. Perhaps they may also unlearn received certainties and excavate their inner wildness. That, after all, is the purpose of art for Whittle: “It’s about opening up a space to be ungovernable.”
Under the skin of the ocean, the thing urges us up wild is at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, until 25 August 2024
