Thom Gorst: SHIPYARD
4th - 10th November 2013, Open daily: 12am - 6pm (Sun 1pm – 5pm)
Thom Gorst Artist Talk - Thurs 7th November at 6pm
Thom Gorst's work brings an abstract vitality to industrial and maritime surfaces. He draws inspiration from the pioneering work of the Boyle Family, sharing their concerns for the pictorial quality of the everyday, and from our current interest in ruination and urban exploration. Through the medium of acrylic on canvas, Thom re-presents and re- aestheticises marks made by rust, salt, wear, abrasion and contingent alteration, and draws our attention back to the sea.
Thom has worked as a qualified architect and as a professor of architecture, and he brings an architect's sensibility to his subject, using conventions of pictorial composition, and deliberately avoiding perspective. His careful use of colour and texture draws on a maritime palette of funnels, decks and hulls, which is then overlaid with marks of corrosion, degradation, abrasion, overpainting and abandonment.
The viewer is presented with an uncompromising reality: closer than maybe ever before to surfaces intended to be seen as far away as the horizon, thus revealing its most intimate secrets.
Thom continues to work as an academic, and his ongoing research is concerned with the aesthetics of dereliction, trying to identify something of beauty in cast-off bits of industry. He is deeply interested in the symbolic value of metal surfaces, and seeks to reinterpret them as things of real beauty.