The selection of events in this piece is highly subjective, some might say unreliable. The piece comprises line drawings and captions based on images in the following book: The Automobile Association (1989) Illustrated London News Great Events of the 20th Century. London: Guild Publishing. Three selectors made this piece: The Illustrated London News, The Automobile… Continue reading 64 Great Events of the 20th Century (a selection)
These stills are from a short film that combines video footage of an artist building a studio with audio recordings of spoken paraphrases of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of containment. It is part of a project from 2014 including four other films. The artist built the studio to create a space that would be… Continue reading Paraphrases – Containment (Kissinger)
Make Your Own is a series of 18 diagrams with texts. The diagrams depict stages in the making of an object. Each diagram is accompanied by three short texts, about three artists. I have anonymised each text* so they are now about a 'he', a 'you' and a 'she'. The photograph above is a draft version… Continue reading Make Your Own
These stills are from 'Dropping', a video* that I first showed in 2002, in 'Household', the augural exhibition of the Pine Gallery on Claremont, Hastings. For several years, much of my everyday life involved bringing up my young family. This video is one of a series I made in an attempt to make sense of being… Continue reading Dropping
These drawings* from 1998-9 are proposals for sculptures I never made. The sculptures would have been movements made solid; imagined movements of doors. Figures 1. and 2. are based on the potential movement of a door in the corner of a studio I shared in Carpenters Road, London. The movement in figure 1. is the… Continue reading Door movement drawings
These are roughs for a project I did in 1997 for a short-lived magazine, Vice Versa. The portraits are of strangers I met in London, mostly on the Southbank. I explained the project to them and asked them if I could take their photograph. Some of them said no. I never knew their names. The… Continue reading What is Art?
This is a draft version of a piece of work that started with a walk. It's a collection of fragments including: a line drawing, drawings from observation and short texts by me and others. The line drawings were made while I walked, by slowly pushing a pen away from me, up a folded sheet of cartridge… Continue reading Fragmentals* (walking and drawing)
I keep sketchbooks, currently using them most often to document moments as I wait for other things to happen (the lights to change, lift doors to open, trains to come, etc.). They're a drawn record of my looking process, and a written record of words I hear while I draw. As these drawings happen in… Continue reading Sketchbooks
These images are stills from Grey Sketchbook 2 video (on Vimeo). The drawings in this sketchbook were done in February 2018, mostly while travelling around London. The text at the bottom of the pages are words I heard while doing the drawings, and sounds in the video are from recordings I made at the same… Continue reading Grey Sketchbook 2 (video)
This drawing documents a train journey. I drew the vertical lines continuously as I travelled, drawing them freehand and trying to make them as straight as possible. I drew at a table, facing towards the back of the train. The wobbles in the lines correspond with movements that the train made as we traveled. They… Continue reading Line drawing (return from Birmingham)
W P Thomas 