Elizabeth Thomson Survey Exhibition 1989 - 2017
Aratoi Museum is pleased to present:
ELIZABETH THOMSON – CELLULAR MEMORY
A SURVEY EXHIBITION 1989 – 2017
9 December 2017 – 2 April 2018
Curated by Gregory O'Brien
OPENING RECEPTION - 8 December 2017 at 6pm
ARTIST AND CURATOR TALK - 9 December at 11am
Elizabeth Thomson ‘Cellular memory’
Gregory O’Brien
The atmosphere of the planet viewed from space. The inside of a plant cell. The surface of a human body. Ocean water at
various depths, sunlight radiating through it. These kinds of territories, most often associated with science, lie at
the heart of Elizabeth Thomson’s art. In her works, the natural world become a site of meditation, reverie and a very
personal kind of poetry.
‘Cellular Memory’ speaks of three decades spent in the studio experimenting with different media and processes, and
pursuing an ever-expanding concept of what art might be. The works in the exhibition are also shaped by extensive
travels in Europe and the Americas, as well as through the Pacific and New Zealand. Observation and direct experience of
the physical world, and the making of a photographic or memory record of it, are her starting point. It would be
accurate to say that the outside world is also her studio.
Thomson’s works can soothe and seduce at the same time as they disarm and unsettle. They also play upon remembered
sensations: her moth works hark back to a childhood experience of such nocturnal fliers in her Titirangi home. Her
oceanic works will strike a chord with anyone who has ever leapt into the ocean, or voyaged beyond sight of dry land.
These works are audacious and powerful and at the same time meticulously planned and executed. Incorporating glass
beading, zinc, bronze, fibreglass and wood panelling, and a variety of photographic and image-making sources, Thomson’s
works are finely tuned and modulated. They offer a view of the world which is at once molecular and planetary. In these
works, we experience both beauty and strangeness, knowing and not knowing, remembering and forgetting; life and art in
accord, talking to each other and to us.
NOTES:
• 'Cellular Memory' at Aratoi Museum surveys Elizabeth Thomson's career from the late 1980s until the present. It
includes art commissioned for the exhibition, work created after her involvement in the 2011 'Kermadec' art project, The Fearless Five Hundred — a school of 500 bronze wall-mounted fish — which has never been shown before in a public art space, and the
room-sized installation Waking Up Slowly, revised for this exhibition, which has only been exhibited once before, at Auckland Art Gallery, in 1996.
•An illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition, to be launched in March 2018 as part of New Zealand Festival's Writers and Readers, in Wellington, with contributions
from Jenny Bornholdt, Lloyd Jones and Gregory O’Brien.
•Thomson also exhibited at Aratoi in 2016 as one of nine artists in the ‘Kermadec – Lines in the Ocean’; Aratoi Museum was the final venue for the international
exhibition.
•Aratoi, 12 Bruce Street, Masterton, Wairarapa, is open daily 10am - 4:30pm, entry by donation.
ends