2024 Artspace Sydney, David M Thomas

Through physical and psychic experiences, I make works that are drawn through the resonant energies of these of these episodes.

Since starting a 15 month residency in late 2023 at Artspace Sydeny, I have worked on a series of non-objective drawings and paintings. I am calling this project, Shapes We Haven’t Seen Before. These works are developments of a shared practice began with Suzanne Howard and are a continuation of the Suburban Mystic wall hangings of 2022. These large colourful works were completed 5 years after Suzanne’s physical passing and were direct amplifications of her drawings.

The studio at Artspace Sydney, with its magnificent and malevolent view, plays an important part in the works making. The speculative real estate on land stolen from the Gadigal people on one side, war machines on the other, cannons fixed on my position and the Pacific Ocean in the middle, channeling its forces directly at me. I reflect on my relationship to Moreton Bay, where I usually live, with its sprawling shallow informality, the Pacific here filtered through a web of mangrove nursery graveyards, perpetual growth and slow decay, pulsing a primordial swamp energy.

Scarlet Dyer, 10 year old daughter of Artspace’s, Senior Curator, Katie Dyer, asked me if I considered myself an abstract painter? I told her, via her mother, who had relayed the question, that I consider myself a post-ideological abstractionist. It may have been easier, more truthful to say simply, I am a spiritual artist, and these paintings and drawings are one project that this current studio residency enables.

These works mark a return to drawing as a concern and or initial step. Before this for several years collage had been the beginning of the project I called Resonant Forms (2019-2022). There is something about drawing something through from the other side. The paper, canvas and now the banner mesh, are membranes between worlds, ones we can see and ones we can’t. Making something invisible visible and sometimes obscuring or muting the visible. This process became a séance ritual, that not only affects my consciousness but connects it with larger universal experiences. Tracing the Ouija board shapes creates a map of plotted, blotted, bleed spots, connected with fine ink line, revealing unique forms I have not seen before, that have a liveliness to them. Drawing life through the paper, canvas or in this case mesh from the other side. The rescaling of these works, in this case to a monumental enlargement from the drawings amplifies these thought forms and energies. 

Some of these works were made directly on canvas drops sheets found in Bland street, immediately behind Artspace. I was already using drop sheets sourced from hardware stores as readymade woven substrates. The found sheets had been used, and already had black spray painted forms and ambiguous/enigmatic stencilled figures already on them. Evidence of work going on down stairs in the galleries, bringing the exhibition spaces back to life, after a period of dormancy. These dramatic black spray painted shapes worked well with the spirit forms I was projecting onto them. The combination became a dance between the found gesture and projected shapes and implied screen spaces. 

I have a temporal cycle that seems to orbit Woolloomooloo and Artspace. My family moved to Ruschutters bay in 1973, I did an internship in 1990 at Artspace, I worked at Artspace in 1994- 1995, I had a studio residency in the same studio I am currently working in 1999 and I exhibited in the Galleries of Artspace in 2000 and now I am here in 2024. I still don’t know why.