Hannah Thomas (b.1973, UK) is a British artist currently working out of her home studio in Wiltshire. Spending her childhood travelling between the UK and stints abroad in locations such as South Korea, Indonesia and Hong Kong as a result of her father’s job as a geologist, she has embraced a life of restless curiosity and intentional rootlessness. This sense of not wishing to be confined and limited to one choice deeply permeates her work as a painter. Her large canvases present fractured, abstracted landscapes populated with biomorphic forms and biological references that all speak of mortality, predation and a kind of reckless freedom.
The natural world looms large in her work, the horror and the wonder, all the hints of the grotesque alongside the beautiful, the fecund and the parastic and above all the flesh. Avoiding the figurative and representational, Hannah has created a space to work in that allows her to continuously experiment and explore the fundamental dilemmas and absurdity of life without falling prey to easy repetition, always pushing her practice forward and changing palette’s, methods of application and mood; she works outside her comfort zone as a matter of course. With little pre-planning, her work is a genuinely organic process, adding layers, changing direction mid way through, never sure where a work is headed until it is finished. Currently working largely with acrylics, oil sticks and pastels on canvas she builds layers with brushwork, often followed by application of paint by fingers, sponges and rubbed back to varying levels of translucency to reveal hints of activity underneath the main image. Nothing is quite as it seems in these densely filled spaces, one thing threatening to overwhelm, familiar yet disembodied elements amidst the strange or slightly uncanny.
Always feeling an outsider in her choices, her desire for a life unfettered by the usual domestic trappings and a refusal to be tied down to a particular life or place fuels her paintings and now, reaching an age where one’s own mortality necessarily gains more prominence, she is producing work with a greater awareness of her own place within it.
Themes of body horror and the flesh combined with parasitism and predation are a combination of the influences of these artists that often feature in some form or another in her work: David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Francis Bacon, HR Giger as well as constantly sourcing the natural history documentaries of David Attenborough.