Molly Thomson’s work concerns the performance of the painting as an object, generally using the conventional painting panel as a springboard for action and a vehicle for thought. She is interested in conditions that confine, resist and limit, and in what happens when those given conditions are subject to question and boundaries are breached.
The process begins with de-stabilising the traditional rectangular format through acts of cutting that destroy the panel’s symmetry and begin to animate the object. Removed elements may be returned, recycled or repurposed, but the tiny losses that occur with each cut cannot be entirely made up for; scars and mendings are evident in surfaces formed of multiple layers of poured paint.
Molly’s paintings present their facades and sometimes a glimpse of their interiors. Occasionally they abandon their dependency on the wall and descend to the floor or other surface, suggesting objects of use or play. In some pieces structural displacements trigger complication and uncertainty in the object; elements which seem to be exposed parts of the painting’s substructure are found to be not in the expected place or orientation, generating a question about what is being seen.The painting is reticent. It alludes to what cannot or shouldn’t be seen.
Operating between acts of damage and reparation, Molly looks for a kind of concentration that can be reached through excisions, shifts and accumulations. With their imperfect geometries the painting/objects are newly-ordered, but not without uncertainty. Modest in scale and means, they insist on their material presence; they betray the acts of attention that shaped them.