Camden Art Centre, London
The artist and musician reclaims beauty and meaning from rubbish, decay and death, using materials from rusted padlocks to old organ pipes. It’s raw, inspiring and absolutely joyous

Should you review the art or the artist? With Lonnie Holley it’s hard to tell them apart, and completely impossible to separate his creativity from the mystery of being alive. When I arrive at Camden Art Centre to review his show, I find the artist making a little sculpture from bits and pieces he has found laying around outside. He starts with a drawing of a woman, then creates her portrait in copper wire, screwing up the drawing to make her hair, then finally gives her a “bow” that’s a discarded grape stem. “She heard it on the grapevine”, he jokes. Transformation, salvation, music – it’s a hypnotic demonstration of his work.

There’s more magic upstairs in a film of Holley performing his 18-minute punk-blues anthem I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, over a montage of images of his present and past. And what an extraordinary past it is. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, Holley learned the value of recycling from his grandmother, who used to take him to salvage whatever they could from the scrapyard. He compares his way of making art with the resourcefulness of Martin Luther King who, in prison in Birmingham, Alabama, for fighting its segregation laws in 1963, “wrote on toilet paper”.

Whitechapel Gallery, London
Woven throughout this compelling collection of sculptures from the Max Mara prizewinner is a ferrous thread of hooks and spikes that drags the cruel history of slavery to the surface

Enter Dominique White’s tolling sea-bell of an exhibition and you will be hooked, then dragged down deep. Four big sculptures are dimly illuminated in a gallery creeping with blue shadows. It is meant to feel as if you are under the sea. Give it time and you will believe you are probing tangled fragments of a shipwreck. Tendrils curl in and out of a sunken cannon. A humanoid hunk of driftwood lashes at you with red swirling tentacles bearing sharp steely points.

Nautical history fascinates London-born White, 31. As winner of the Max Mara art prize for women, she received a six-month residency in Italy to research and develop this show. A film, with the glossy production standards you’d expect of the Max Mara fashion house, shows her exploring the vast harbour of Genoa with its 16th-century lighthouse. It includes interviews with leading Italian scholars of the history of the Mediterranean; one of them quotes Fernand Braudel’s classic work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.