“Her large, bold canvases represent the absurd and the predatory, the macabre and the nostalgic amidst the constant push for individual autonomy and freedom in a society entangled in its own moral relativism”.

BIOGRAPHY:

(b. 1973 Reading) Hannah Thomas is an abstract artist, she graduated from University of the West of England with a BA hons in Art and Visual Culture in 2000. Initially pursuing a career as a professional photographer she lived and worked in London for over a decade, mostly working within the music industry. She transitioned into painting in 2019 keen to explore a more autonomous and tactile practice and works largely with acrylic mediums and oil pastels on canvas.

Hannah is currently a finalist in the Dubel Prize: Emerging Artist of the Year, and recently had a solo show with Red Eight Gallery in London highlighting her recent work.  Her work has also been included in recent group shows in London with AucArt, SOTA, Candid Arts Trust and Visual Artists Association and she was recently longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2024.

Her work is included in private and corporate collections in the UK and Internationally. She is currently participating in the correspondence course with Turps Art School in London to further develop her studio practice and working on a new body of work for release in the summer.

STATEMENT:

My paintings probe ideas of the absurd and the macabre, combining emotional expressionistic mark making and musings on fundamental existential dilemmas.

Due in part to my participation in Turps Art School’s Correspondence Course, my practice is evolving fast, moving away slightly from the bold colour blocks and more illustrative style that has dominated my practice for the last couple of years. I work mainly with acrylics, indian ink and oil pastels.

My paintings are a celebration of the ‘other’, often populated by motifs that reference the figurative or biological, indicating the presence of a creature or life form representing the savage, the outsider, the disturber of the status quo, existing outside of and in spite of social and political shifts; it is a constant, the darkness under the fragile membrane of civilisation. I am segueing into using more transparency and a darker palette and have been referencing elements of deep sea life and the natural world where some of the most macabre and fantastic life forms emerge from the eternal darkness of great depths. I hope the works evoke a potent atmospheric response, a sensory reaction, strong responses in myself always come from the gut not the head and I am hoping the works will insinuate themselves into the nervous system of the viewer.

My work references a wide mix of visual cues, from primitive figurative art to H R Giger and Francis Bacon, the natural world and the cinema of David Lynch and David Cronenberg.