David Thomson
“Sadly David Thomson is no longer with us. He passed away before he could graduate. This is an attempt to assemble a tiny fragment of his wild, prodigious and curious practice, along with some notes he made around his work. I had the privilege of supervising David through his Honours year and his profound and perceptive intelligence, boundless creativity and curiosity was a gift that will live on through his work and in our memories.”
“David Thomson, whose practice stretches back decades, was also – in a paradoxical inverse looping he would love – about to graduate as an honours student. He was an artist who did himself the great service of always and entirely taking his art seriously. To honour that achievement, a brief map of the territory includes: recalling the circular motion of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, to loop back is to reinvestigate, to understand, also to make sense of an emotion through an object, to analyse what has happened, is happening. An engagement with other artists, the history of art as a continuing analytical tool.”
“I was laying in bed in the dark looking around at things in my room. I could see the legs of a stool and of a table but I was unable to discern their actual form. Ambiguous, I could make up what they may now look like as different to their daylight form. I called them ‘shadow furniture’ and they became a kind of psychological architecture.”
Architectures for the Maternal Empire, 2020
Clown paint, wood, tape, acrylic, glass, text, image, gloves, cotton buds, bronze, milk bottles (plastic)
