Elizabeth Thomson
Supposition

Upstairs in the Long Room, Two Rooms presents Supposition and Mondo Tondo.

One of New Zealand’s foremost sculptors, Thomson has for twenty years created exquisitely crafted works that explore the interplay between art and science. She is interested in repetitive pattern, looking to the abstract, formal and the harmonious but at the same time intrigued with the ruptures, disjunctions and absurdities of the natural world – hence the element of science fiction or ‘sci-fi’, which is never far from the surface.

There is a serene beauty on the order of nature that cannot be accounted for by chance. The economical and elegant solutions developed under evolutionary pressures are functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. 1

The micro-worlds of ‘Supposition’ and ‘Mondo Tondo’ are essentially abstract compositions. Pokered and branded with red hot tools and smoke; the process is in a refined way vigorous, violent and primal, capturing and containing that energy within the bounds of the circular.

These smoke-softened tessellated images hover between the intimate view through a microscope, craters and rivers of planets observed through a telescope and satellite images of the fractured terrains of distance worlds.

1 Gilmore, Clarence P: The Unseen Universe – Photographs from the Scanning Electron Microscope. Schocken Broks, New York, 1971