Peter Thomas

Peter Thomas is a Melbourne based artist who makes work that addresses violence, trauma, and memory.

Aftermath is an exhibition of earlier works that arose from research undertaken by Thomas into how and why traumatic events are remembered or forgotten. The larger works focus on the immediate aftermaths of macro-scale traumatic events that have been memorialised, recorded, and now echo through our culture. The smaller works depict sites of individual traumas, forgotten by all but those involved. People died at these places but there are no memorials and no cultural memory beyond a dusty newspaper in the archive to record what happened. We pass by every day on our way to work, oblivious to the stories those ‘nothing’ places can tell.

The medium Thomas works with has moved on since he created these works, but his concerns remain the same; trauma, memory, and forgetting. While recent bodies of work focus on his own experiences and memories, these earlier pieces looked at cultural memories — or their lack.