The body of work that forms the exhibition, Realignment, has grown from her concern with the performance of the painting as an object. 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 exhibition’s title refers to the processes of reorganisation involved after certainties are disrupted and a new position must be reached, albeit one that isn’t immune to question.
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 may be evident.
The paintings present their facades, including sometimes a glimpse of their interiors, and angular forms may protrude like redundant bits of architecture. 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.
Operating between acts of damage and reparation, Molly looks for a kind of concentration that can be reached through excisions, shifts and fine accumulations. With their imperfect geometries the painting/objects are newly-ordered propositions. They are modest in scale but insist on their material presence; they betray the acts of attention that shaped them.
Molly Thomson studied sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art and painting at the Royal College of Art in London. She lives and works in Norfolk.
