I have recently completed a studio residency in my adopted home town of Brisbane, at the Sculptors Queensland shed, behind the old Museum. I have made work there for the last 3 months. 

For me the most important thing about my art practice and life are people and the relationships that are created through studio and orbiting activities.

As such this period has been both intensely challenging and deeply rewarding and I would like to acknowledge and thank the people I worked with at this time.

The residency program was managed by my friend Erika Scott and I have been fortunate and very grateful to work with extraordinary artists who currently reside in Brisbane, Sarah Poulgrain, Charlie Donaldson, Azadeh Hamzeii, Reuben Keehan, Max Fowler-Roy, Callum Gallerty, Archie Moore, ∑GG√E|N, Weekend Immendorff, Naomi Blacklock, Summer Hiskins-Ravest and Lawrence English.

Resonant Forms

These works are my way of reflecting on ideas and history and how the current experience of these phenomenon have changed for everyone. As a younger person I was very much inspired by pop and counter cultures as  I received them through the mediated experiences of the time, television, movies, records and magazines. 

This has changed because these deeply nuanced and richly mediated experiences LPs, audio tapes, VHS tapes, books, movies and radio shows are now all located in one handheld computer everyone seems to magically own and walk around with.

This history and it’s experience have been negated and at the same time corralled into one convenient gadget or application? distilled down into tick tock, an unfortunate and yet amusing onomatopoetic reminder of the mesmerised viewers life/time slipping away from them. Time spent never ever coming back, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. The person who came up with the name for that application/platform is killing them self with laughter.

So the starting point for the resonant form works were cutting out the images of famous people from a 20 year anniversary edition of Rolling Stone magazine I had acquired in my late teens. These works are extensions of my ongoing interest in the process of cutting up or re-contextualising found materials and assembling and arranging them. I am also interested in how this activity underpins the history of modern art and points to an ongoing broader cultural activity that continues now.

I have described my practice to people as 80% moving things around and maybe 10% looking and 10% thinking, not in any particular order.

The starting point for these works were a series of cut out paper works that formed the basis for weavings and furniture modifications and improvised non-specific, non functional objects. Some of the flat works used a room divider I acquired from my mother. The divider formed an architectural space for the works to exist in and relate to, or a zone of interaction if you like, a bit like a domesticated white cube. These works featured in a solo show I had at Stable in Brisbane recently.

At the end of 2020, I collaborated with Sarah Poulgrain who at that time was making steel furniture that functioned as regular furniture and as sculpture. Erika Scott then asked me to participate in an exhibition at Soylent Spot and I suggested to Sarah that we could/should do a collaborative work for that. Which turned out well and called “initialchatfriendslist” so I thought it would be good to keep this working relationship going and develop a work during the residency at the shed. 

The “magazine shelf” came from combining the function of a magazine stand that I acquired in Sydney in the 1990’s that I use in my home studio as display furniture for an archive of flat works and publications. The stand is always changing, if only incrementally, things stay and they go, they are evaluated over time, some times a long time, even years. Then I saw a postcard that my friend Sophie Coombs gave to me and was struck by the elegance of how it was its own stand, it supported itself independently, simple, effective and portable. 

I had also noticed how Hans Arp worked in his studio with stacked wall mounted shelves. I imagine he did this because it allowed him to move things around very easily and see them in relation to each other.

So I designed something that assimilated these qualities and ideas, made a sketch-up model, and sent it to Sarah who was quite positive about it.

I asked her if she would show me how to weld and work with steel and if we could make the magazine shelf together? With the understanding that skill and knowledge sharing was an intrinsic part of her practice. I also had a desire to challenge my own understanding of what it is that I do, and try to extend it and step outside of it. So a big part of this residency at the sculptors shed was spent in Sarah’s studio in Woolloongabba. I am truly grateful for the amount of time Sarah allocated over the three month period, where Sarah would alternate from teaching something to doing a lot of the work. But in the end I think we became an efficient team, Sarah weaving metal together and me grinding away where and when necessary. As it got hotter this work got harder and more intense.

The resulting object was uncannily similar to the sketch-up model. Making something in sketch-up is tedious, fiddly but relatively quick, painless and clean, you can do it in the comfort of your own home. Making a thing out of metal however involves acquiring, moving, cutting welding, drilling and finally bolting it all together. It is exhausting, dirty, dangerous and sometimes fun and ultimately very rewarding. Depending on who you are doing it with, of course. One of the funny things about the steel was buying it from a supplier in Woolloongabba, the people there seemed suspicious and miserable as opposed to Sarah who was in contrast always funny, curious, kind and affable. 

David M.Thomas, Summer 2021