Photograph credited to Laura Rhodes http://curiousrosephotography.com/
BIO
Elena Thomas has a studio in Stourbridge, West Midlands. She has a wide-ranging multi-disciplinary practice which includes drawing, writing, textiles, installation, sound, songwriting, and performance. She has exhibited across the UK, Sweden, and the USA.
https://www.instagram.com/elenathomas13/
Could you explain your practice? Only you know why you do what you do…
I do what I do to try to make sense of the world around me. Particularly I am interested in the way people interact, relationships, fleeting or lasting, and I frequently focus on children. This is why I work across different media. Sometimes I feel compelled to draw, sometimes to manipulate materials, and sometimes only a song will do the trick. It is about how I understand things, but also about the communication of that understanding, or at least the endeavour to understand and communicate.
I spend four or five days a week in my studio, or in other people’s studios, or working on things outside that space to bring back to it. It is a comfortable, clean(ish) domesticated space. It has carpet, it is warm, I have a variety of beverages and with a bit of notice can bake or buy biscuits. Invited visitors are always welcome. When I arrive I tend to that space, put the kettle on, decide what to do, and arrange the large table top. Flick through books, handle materials, listen to music…I try to read for a while to start my day, with a cup of tea, then will crack on. This environment is important to me.
At the moment I am making “twigs” out of reclaimed packaging paper. I like to work with multiples, so I won’t really know what I am going to do with them until I have loads - possibly hundreds. I think metaphorically, and semiotically: the things I make stand for other things, so the materiality is important. My lyric writing is full of metaphors too. Sometimes a metaphor can simplify something difficult, and can help me get my head around things that have happened. My solo show last year at RBSA was titled Five, Six, Pick Up Sticks and concerned the terrible statistics of child poverty in my town. I wrapped over 1000 twigs in fabric. It was an act of care. It was laborious but cathartic to make it and show it. It felt like a commitment, a promise. Conversations were had that I was pleased to have initiated.
Is art relevant today?
I bloody hope so! I’m putting an awful lot of effort into it! I think if you ask any artist, from any period in time this question they would all say “Now more than ever!” Art is the most human thing we can do, in any circumstance, especially when we feel helpless. Art can reach places in people that words and war can’t.
We are always asked what other artists influence us, we want to know what you don’t like and which influences you…
This question made me pause… because I don’t have a list of famous artists on the tip of my tongue to trot out to impress. But I do have artists that I work with and talk to on a regular basis about the work we do, the world around us, what we are reading, what we have seen, and listened to, what is making us happy, and what is making us angry, and what can we do about it. Artists Kate Murdoch, Stuart Mayes, Helen Garbett, and Bill Laybourne, poet Rick Sanders, my bandmates and co-writers Andy Jenkins and Ian Sutherland, also Michael Clarke (my co-writer and co-producer for the Drawing Songs project) these people are hugely inspiring. The things I read, currently are Lines, and Correspondences, both by Tim Ingold, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K Le Guin, and The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. And loads of music I listen to… a long list of inspirations and motivations. People who are alive and chatty. Not dead or inaccessible artists.
In terms of what I don’t like… it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that certain things don’t speak to me: photoreal paintings that don’t go anywhere… I can’t see the point. I want the reality to challenge me, to provoke some sort of reaction. I can acknowledge the skill but that’s as far as it goes. I do like to see the evidence of close focus in an artist’s work. (I have stopped using the word obsessed.) I want to see if they are really getting their teeth into something, so if I see something I consider lazy, I’m inclined to move on. I’m not saying the work doesn’t have merit, people are free to make what they want, and I defend their right to do so… but these things aren’t for me.
If you could go back 10-20 years what would you tell your younger self?
I would say jump before you are pushed. I only concentrated totally on my own practice when I was pushed in a stressful and traumatic way (by a new manager) out of a job I had been in and loved for ten years. Being comfortable and waged sometimes keeps you from taking a leap of faith.
If you could go forward 10-20 years what do you hope to have done/not done?
I hope I have another 20 years (I’m 63) and I hope I can just keep making art and writing songs till I drop. I acknowledge my privilege that I am able financially now to just about manage without having to work for anyone else. I have no great drive to be rich and famous, but to continue talking to interesting people, and to continue responding to the world by making would be an amazing way to live the life I have left. Having said that, there are places I would like to visit, residencies I’d like to do, people I’d like to work with…
Oh… and I hope I don’t leave behind a skip full of crappy drawings and old twigs that my family will have to deal with.
BELOW IS A SOUND PIECE BY THE ARTIST;
Drawing Songs is a project that combines the visual art and songwriting of Elena Thomas. Drawings are large-scale, abstract organic lines and forms. The songs are built from ambient sounds, the sounds made while drawing and collected lyrics inspired by relationships and Elena's habit of eavesdropping... the songs were co-written and co-produced with Michael Clarke
