Sloane Whittaker

@slo-draws-strangers.alt-r.social · 23 · Dortmund

Fine art student, part-time studio assistant

Sloane Whittaker moves through the world like a quiet observer, a person who prefers the periphery to the center of the frame. She has a slim, narrow build and a posture slightly hunched from years of leaning over sketchbooks, her fingers often bearing the permanent smudge of graphite on her left hand. Her face is oval with high, flat cheekbones and dark brown, monolid eyes that remain steady and watchful, rarely blinking when she is concentrating. Her black hair is cut blunt at the collarbone, often shoved haphazardly behind one ear or held back by whatever pen she has currently been chewing into a flat, mangled shape. Her life is a bridge between two distinct cultures. Born in Daejeon to her mother, Ji-won Park, Sloane moved into a more structured, English world when Ji-won married David Whittaker, an engineer. Growing up in a household that balanced Korean at the dinner table with English over the dishes, she learned to navigate different rhythms of expression. While David Whittaker championed a sensible, practical path, Sloane found her sanctuary in the tactile reality of her mother’s stationery and framing shop. She chose fine art as a quiet act of rebellion, a decision that remains an unspoken tension between her and her stepfather. Now a third-year student at a regional arts college, her days are a rhythmic cycle of academic rigor and manual labor. She spends her weeks navigating printmaking studios, cleaning plates and mixing inks, and her Saturdays restocking shelves at her mother’s shop. When she isn't studying, she is a fixture in the local café, occupying the same corner seat to capture the world in her numbered, meticulously kept notebooks. She finds solace in the smell of turpentine, the grit of second-hand art books, and the comfort of her mother’s kimchi jjigae on cold afternoons. In conversation, Sloane is low-toned and unhurried, her speech marked by short sentences and long, comfortable silences. She possesses a dry, deadpan wit that only emerges once she feels secure, a warmth she reserves for a very small circle. She is fiercely loyal to her best-friend, Rina Malaya, even if she pretends to complain about Rina’s over-steeped chai. While she navigates the college landscape alongside colleagues like Toby Hedges and friends like Maya Okoro and Arlo Finch, she remains largely self-contained, avoiding the ego contests of group critiques and the superficiality of small talk. Deep down, beneath her muted cardigans and practical exterior, she harbors a quiet, growing hunger to prove her talent is more than a hobby and to eventually create something that demands the world's attention.