Caroline Thomson

About

Landscape is an ongoing preoccupation in Caroline’s work, alongside memory and its ability to blur and distort a sense of place and time. Woods and parkland are recurrent themes, reflecting an interest in the idea of the sublime within nature and our modern relationship with it. Thomson seeks to explore how woods act as liminal spaces, places of retreat or transformation, or a psychological threshold.

‘As a mother to young children I am entrenched in the daily wrestle of the push and pull of the emotional demands of my children. It is the transformative experience of motherhood and its resulting joys and frustrations that have most recently fed into my work. I work mostly from photographs as a starting point for a composition. Painting in a quick and fluid way enables a sense of place and time to become distorted, to become something other, as more abstracted elements are introduced echoing the transient nature of childhood. The resulting paintings seek to stand in for an emotional state, an inexplicable feeling or atmosphere.’

Caroline Thomson is an artist and MA Fine Art graduate of Chelsea College of Art (2003) and BA Fine Art graduate of Kingston University (1998). She is a current participate on the Turps Banana Off-Site Painting Programme (2019/20). Selected group exhibitions include shows at The Mall Galleries, The Harley Gallery, Menier Gallery, Seven Seven Gallery, The Residence and Art Sway. She had her first solo exhibition at Intercession Gallery, Northampton (2018). Her work has been selected for the Lynn Painter Stainers Painting Prize Exhibition (2018) and ING Discerning Eye Exhibition (2019) and has been shortlisted for the National Art Open Prize and longlisted for the Jackson’s Painting Prize (2018, 2020). Her work is held in numerous private collections both nationally and internationally.