Molly Thomson
Molly Thomson is a painter who lives and works in Norfolk, near Norwich. She was born in Perth, Scotland, studied fine art and sculpture at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, and took an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in London, where she received the John Minton Award.
Her work treats the painting as an object. She builds a small panel, then cuts, displaces and reassembles it, so that the finished piece is irregular in outline, stands away from the wall and carries the evidence of the decisions that shaped it. She works in acrylic on wood and panel, with filler, found material and the residues of the studio.
She taught painting at Falmouth College of Art and was Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio. She then spent nearly two decades at Norwich University of the Arts, as Subject Leader for Painting and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art. She was co-guest-editor, with Barbara Howey, of the Commitment in Painting issue of the Journal of Contemporary Painting.
She shows regularly with Contemporary British Painting and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and in Japan, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, France and Australia.
Artist Statement
My work often begins simply with a small rectangular panel which I have put together using a rough ready-made stretcher whose flimsy canvas has been replaced with MDF. This provides me with the most basic of starting points while taking me a step towards engaging with the piece as an object that inhabits space. The direction a work will take is the consequence of a series of cuts or displacements that alter the centre of balance and provoke a problem to be solved. Occasionally the cutting is drastic and emergency measures are necessary to maintain the structure. I often have a number of small pieces on the go at the same time and they can play off one another, through their similarities or differences. I am interested in the conversations they strike up, either with each other or other objects lying around the studio. Like conversations they can come and go. I find the idea of provisionality or temporariness quite attractive, though it doesn't stop me from attempting to achieve a kind of precision or poise.
