Artist
Tommy’s painting operates between abstraction and representation. In this elastic, spongy borderline there is potential to carve out a territory that both employs the languages of abstract painting and de-familiarizes it’s conventions. Paint allows Tommy to produce spaces that are never definite and situate themselves slightly askew, in a questioned reality.
Tommy’s work looks into everyday, common spaces. These spaces can be in his immediate surroundings, such as the studio, but, they can also be ‘non-places’; places, which are part of our daily commute, and are not experienced as places, but once looked at, often have a remarkable oddness and offer up much to investigate. These “non-places” are bypassed and their space is not experienced as a place. Tommy addresses these anonymous spaces within the everyday and wishes to enliven their facelessness with some potential for confrontation with issues of time, looking and interpretation or even just a pause. Tommy would like to open up for the viewer a space where time is slowed down and experiences evoked in his paintings are re-triggered in their daily life.
The details in these found spaces inform his painting. These details are generally chance markings or patterns on walls, they can be human residue, like tea stains, they can also be natural, like the wearing of time on a particular area.
“To try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive, to wrest a few scraps from the void, as it grows, to leave a furrow, a trace, a mark, or a few signs”.
Georges Perec, Species of Space.
Envoi a poem by Octavio Paz
Imprisoned by four walls
(To the north, the crystal of non-knowledge
a landscape to be invented
to the south, reflective memory
to the east, the mirror
to the west, stone and the song of silence)
I wrote messages, but received no reply
Contact
- Email: tommyramsay@ntlworld.com