Peter Thomas
Field Memories
1 June – 25 June 2023
Opening | Thurs 1 June 6-8pm
Fox Galleries presents Peter Thomas’ ‘Field Memories’, a compelling series of oil paintings and sculptural felt works that invite you into a personal navigation. Light filled nostalgic spaces that could loosely be described as landscapes or nature inspired visual correlations; raw delicate surfaces with distinctive marks of structural integrity- they’re surreal, idyllic and conceptual.
The layers in the paintings, act like components or differentiations- wielding the indeterminate, amorphous form in combination with statistical sensations and experimental overlays that test the relationships of these paradoxical artforms. Each field memory is a symbiosis: of values, systems,linguistics and the relationships between definitions of the ‘field’.
Like a true statistician, Thomas is conveying complex ideas expressed in succinct patterns, diagrams and imagery. Each fleeting arrangement cleverly encompass the emotive expressions of nostalgia, or ‘field memories’ into distilled conceptional pieces that allow logical absurdities to play out under carefully organised lines- adroitly highlighting the gap between visual language systems and meanings that comprise good (ideal), truth and beauty.
Thomas’ contemporaneous abstract expressions of ‘colour field painting’ are reactions that explore and integrate visual problems, a kind of squished venn; comparing and contrasting enlightenment, logic, and concepts. Peter Thomas’ longing light, filtrates through charged surfaces of ‘the Field’, allowing you into a site of reminiscence full of urgent beauty and satisfying ideas.
In the artists own words:
“Field Memories for me are literally my memories of fields of knowledge, work and the outdoors. They overlap and create harmony or discord. The immovable object butts up against the ethereal and the fleeting.”
PETER THOMAS
is a Melbourne based, multidisciplinary artist who makes work that addresses materiality, memory and the problem of nostalgia.
Thomas’ continual exploration of ‘trace’ through architectural, human and nature interventions bring a charged and surging tactility to his surfaces. Eschewing the historic preference for a single ‘style’, his work offers a thematic continuity both subtle and dynamic. His actioned surfaces provide entry points that hold and suspend an experience of altered materiality; balancing the interrelationship of weight, gravity and movement.
Thomas holds a Master of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and was that year’s recipient of the Athenaeum Club Acquisitive Prize. In 2012 he was awarded the inaugural Stuart Black Travelling Scholarship. He has been shortlisted for the 2012 Swan Hill Print and Drawing Award, 2016 Paul Guest Award and 2017 Hadley’s Art Prize. His work as been collected by Artbank and is held in several private collections.
