Drawing often involves a degree of simplification. The process of translating reality into two dimensions is not so much an act of shaving off what cannot fit but finding the most necessary components and their articulation needed in a description. The world seen, melted, clarified.
Even with the vast history of rendering the world into 2D media there remains a magic in the interpretation of mark making. Pictorial literacy (in relation to ideograms, graphics, cinema etc) is often a forgotten relative to reading and writing. As much as handwriting is an unacknowledged fragment of drawing.
Despite not always using traditional drawing media, drawing feels central to Tom’s practice. The delicate compositions in his cyanotypes and de-silvered mirrors appear as drawn lines from afar, with only close inspection revealing the marks as subtractions; undeveloped shadows of hand bent wire and layers of paint, copper and silver removed with a needle from the back of a mirror. The significant labour involved in creating these marks is not immediately apparent on viewing; instead, there is an immediacy to the line work and compositions.
And despite the simple and almost disarming frankness to his work there is a slipperiness in Tom’s renderings. Forms are gently held by fragmented lines and there is a succinct looseness to Tom’s ‘drawings’ – simplification to the point of suggestion.
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A line enters a page and loops — the eye follows, as the hand must have drawn it
A wave of energy pulling up, over, down, sideways
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If water is an underlying stream running throughout Tom’s practice; an instigating seed, a method of thought, a bridging coincidence between work, a physical medium to work with, then time is a hidden consideration within his practice. Future chances, frozen moments, the past and the present touching as gentle as dust settling on a surface and the slippage between the everyday action that seems to repeat itself like the sun and moon and within the literal looping videos, where time is both always moving and paradoxically captured. Within these streams, the future and past are held in trembling existence.
