This exhibition began as a conversation, long distance between Helen Newton-Brown and I, early in 2025. Initially envisioned as two exhibitions for Mary Cherry Contemporary—a solo show drawing from my project Shapes We Haven’t Seen Before, and a group presentation curated from both new and long-standing collaborators—things eventually condensed. Practicalities intervened. The result is Phenomenal Matter, a single, hybrid event where proximity replaces partition.

Here, four artists convene through matter and motion: Anne-Marie May and Ebony Maurice Wilmott from Melbourne, Elizabeth Pulie from Sydney, and myself, currently based in Brisbane. The exhibition is a meeting of materials—pigment, textiles, Brass steel, glass—and of gestures that resist neat classification: rubbing, unravelling, stacking, staining, scattering, and, yes, painting.

As the central organiser, my contribution draws from Shapes We Haven’t Seen Before, an inquiry into the immaterial edges of abstraction, where spirit, memory, and perception press against—and bleed through—surface. This work engages with the tradition of spiritual abstraction, guided by foremothers like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Martin, seeking ways to transmit the invisible through the stubborn tactility of material. How does one give form to the formless? How can matter hold breath, vibration, or presence?     

Phenomenal Matter doesn’t so much answer as enact. It unfolds through action, through process. The works do not illustrate—they emanate. They channel a conscious touch, aligning with a lineage of abstraction that treats form as a mode of thought and presence as principle. My own practice—shaped in conversation with Colour Field painters, especially Martin and Ad Reinhardt—has pursued these questions for years. What does it mean to think through material? What might a brushstroke, a gathered scrap, a lump of clay know?

In this exhibition, matter itself becomes epistemological. These are not objects to be decoded but experiences to be felt—fields of reflection, spaces of projection. The artists here don’t assert ideology; they open channels and transmit frequencies. Each work proposes: making is thinking, perception is contact, the studio is a site of inquiry.

To call this “spiritual abstraction” might be too easy—but it’s not wrong. There is something sacred in the grit of it. A poetics of presence. These works are not declarations; they are occasions. They don’t shout. They resonate.

David M Thomas June 2025

Anne-Marie May appears courtesy of Sutton Gallery.

LIst Of Works

Elizabeth Pulie, #108 (Curtain for E) 2020, acrylic on hessian, metal rings, mixed fibre 270 x 190cm

Ebony Maurice-Wilmott, Orbit 2024, thread on calico (framed), 60 x 45 cm

Ebony Maurice-Wilmott, Shaped Glass 2024, cut glass on metal shelf,  440 x 70 cm

Anne-Marie May, Drawing T5: (Aura Frame) 2021, thermally formed acrylic,180 x 120 cm

Anne-Marie May, Drawing T51 (Unforeseen Constellation) 2021, thermally formed acrylic, 180 x 120 cm

David M Thomas, Nigredo, 2025, Ink and acrylic paint on used canvas drop sheet (gifted by Gemma Smith) and gold thumb tacks, 153 x 173 cm

David M Thomas, (Space Time) Musical Theatre 2025, Acrylic paint and ink on canvas drop sheet, brass microphone stand, 900 x 1650