Virginia Chihota has created a special artist's edition for Whitechapel Gallery in support of the Whitechapel Gallery Errantry Fund.

'Chibereko Chakaramba Kuudzirwa/The Womb Refused To Be Told', is a drawing that relates to a series of the same name executed in 2022, contemplating the conditions influencing acts of personal refusal and resistance that come into force, in protection of selfhood, family and community.

The large-scale paintings largely produced through the screen-printing process, were each a palimpsest of drawn, and photographed motifs creating densely layered compositions, weaving together the realms of Chihota's sub-conscious and lived reality. The series expressed how one might find the spiritual energy to break damaging psychological cycles and alternatively create hopeful and generative ones to live and thrive by.

Introspective in nature, Virginia Chihota's work is deeply influenced by personal experiences - landmark and every day. In a reflection on intimacy and the human figure, she has addressed themes such as childbearing, parenting, marriage, kinship, bereavement and faith. At once mundane and transcendental, rife with allusions to everyday life, and religious and folkloric symbolism, her works on canvas and paper display a raw, expressionist verve and a striking grace in the elaborate use of patterns, textures and layers. Having trained as a printmaker, Chihota’s use of screen-printing is as confident as it is original to produce unique works of striking formal complexity. They often depict the female form (her own body being the foundational reference), blending into near abstraction, or figural unions set amongst an iconographic repertoire emphasising connectedness and collectivity. Chihota's work highlights the ways in which female agency can disrupt borders and activate concerns around different forms of belonging. Subjectivity emerges as a concept embedded in notions of interrelatedness.