Thomas Dowse: Work in Progress

reception 6-8pm 22 June 2016

Thomas Dowse’s drawings exist halfway between the living and the redundant, being both inanimate object and charged with the characteristics of human subjects. The tension between the two states derives from a process that begins with his iPhone. Taking pictures of discarded household appliances and ephemera; the domestic detritus that litters the streets around his Tottenham home. Having amassed a body of over 300 photographs and drawings with no obvious goal in mind, the work grows organically from the screen to the sketchbook, becoming larger in scale and eventually 3-dimensional ceramic pieces. Somewhere along this process the works became increasingly evocative of the environments they have been extracted from, caught in the fluctuating states of deterioration.

Informed as much by comics, science fiction and garish 80s cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as Philip Guston, Anselm Kiefer and the eerie, frozen tableaus of Ed Keinholz, Thomas’ practice is multi-disciplinary. Straddling photography, animation, printmaking and ceramics with drawing as their impetus the works on display are culled from the previous 12 months as a resident artist at C4RD.

Thomas Dowse (b.1982) is a London based artist who graduated from the Royal College in 2012 and has since worked as a freelance Illustrator and Animator and is a Visiting Lecturer at the RCA, UCA Farnham and Northampton. 

www.thomasdowse.com

The work can be viewed at the reception (all welcome) or during opening times 1 – 6pm Thursday – Saturday, at 2 – 4 Highbury Station Road, Highbury Islington N1 1SB, London or by appointment via email. C4RD is a Registered UK Charity 1123530, and would particularly like to acknowledge the support for this exhibition of the Dovehouse Trust.