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One gains a tacit understanding of the 'continuing process' within Scott Whitaker's work – a sense whereby size, shape, structure and scale unfold. The work presents its audience with a complete panoply of formal relationships. The interdependence of Whitaker's paintings and sculptures flow from the archival collection of forms that serve as the source material for his productions. These forms by themselves are decidedly ordinary. Collected from an aged rubbish heap they are the debris of a Second World War American base, yet paradoxically, they are the most domestic of items – teapots, saucepans, enamel jugs, etcetera. In their domesticity the forms conjure an intrinsic interiority, they speak of something personal and hidden, and in a sense this feeling is never quite displaced – not even when these forms are transcribed into monumental proportions.
It is the constant repetition of the shapes of these objects throughout Whitaker's work which gives it this serial presence. The work always attempts to investigate and re-apply ever new, though ultimately repetitious configurations of the same forms. The formal attractions of this work are obvious and undisguised. The shapes, simplified to their most basic elements, have a ubiquitous quality. One of the most dominant of the forms within this exhibition was the large urn and a number of the canvases, as well as the sculptures, mirrored this vessel. This lineament is the progeny of the archaeological features which Whitaker is at pains to extend in his work. The urn reaches back to the symmetry of the Greek but without its sense of smooth perfection; its empty rhetoric. Within this concept of the classical we find Whitaker consciously imitating the archaeological process. In the excavation and