Hugh Hamshaw Thomas
There is a subtle negotiation of how experience, memory and nostalgia are mediated within the pictorial conventions of Landscape depiction with a lingering sense of elegiac melancholia. Nature is the mirror and our gaze on it is the filter sifting projections of cultural constructs and modes of representation.
His growing up in the countryside of Farnham, Surrey and schooling in Sussex imbued a strong sense of Place and Landscape. Notions of the romantic, bucolic and arcadian became suffused in a growing imagination and became more symbolically internalised with the death of his first girlfriend at nineteen.
His growing up in the countryside of Farnham, Surrey and schooling in Sussex imbued a strong sense of Place and Landscape. Notions of the romantic, bucolic and arcadian became suffused in a growing imagination and became more symbolically internalised with the death of his first girlfriend at nineteen.
These works explored ideas of mortality, trace and memory through discarded plastic flowers found in cemetery bins and charity shops. These themes were explored further with cyanotypes on wood again looking at ideas of absence and simulacra.
His recent work continues to question ideas of representation and memory through Landscape imagery.
These digitally manipulated photographs play with and reconfigure ideas of the historical and pictorial within the Decorative Arts, re-addressing the construction of meanings via signifiers of colour, reference and association.
