Jon Whitbread

I am an artist based in Brixton, South London where I have lived for 26 years. I studied at the City and Guilds School of Art, Kennington and received my MA (Merit) in Fine Art from the University of Creative Arts in 2019. I worked as a stone mason and carver in and around London for 17 years and taught carving and sculpture at the Building Crafts College, London for 10 years. I am a published poet.


I am interested in the data that flows to and fro across the porous border between the conscious and the unconscious mind and how we can be oblivious to this or probe it for meaning, truth and certainty. I am interested in the limitations of language in this transaction and our dependence upon it, and I am interested in what tools, processes and materials have to say. 

Working with minimal planning, I allow behaviour and material to engage with each other in cyclic mutual activation removing narratives, concepts and certainty from my work and getting lost in a labyrinth of making to better investigate notions of the equivalence of absence and presence, of the unseen windowed by the seen.

MA Fine Art (Merit), UCA, 2019

Architectural Stone-carving, City and Guilds School of Art, London 1996-1999

History BA (Hons), Polytechnic of North London, 1987

December 2024 Painting and stone sculpture in Group Show @ The Transformation Gallery, Brixton

June 2024 Exhibition of 18 new paintings at The Lovely Gallery, London

March 2023 Group Show
OWW Gallery, Brixton, London

October 2022 Finalist with honourable mention International Art Awards (IAA) New Generations

October 2020 In Dialogue With The Unknown
Group Show
Die Kunstschaffenden Gallery, Linz, Austria

September 2019 MA Final Group Show
The Civic Gallery, Barnsley

September 2018 Aletheia with Emma Somerset Davis
The Lovely Gallery, Sydenham