Thomas Arnold

I collect fragments of lived experience, including memories, conversations, and dreams, resulting in deeply personal collages. An enduring love for the immediacy of painting and drawing is reflected in its constant presence within these collages, which take on a range of forms, from handmade books to large-scale works with scavenged wood. A fascination with the stories embedded within found materials means the surfaces I work on and with include driftwood, bedsheets and scraps of paper. For me, they provide a way to assert the right of queer stories to be part of the natural landscape of existence.

Finished works resemble dreams, hovering somewhere between reality and fiction. Recurring motifs of abstract and elusive male figures, blocks, moustaches, dashes, short written observations and separated heads and bodies recur, enveloped in a colour palette of deep reds and yellows. Piecing together physical and metaphorical fragments of emotional relevance allows me to construct narratives around themes of queerness, connection, otherness, and observation.

The aim of my work remains firm; by prioritising communicating the essence of experience over literal representation, I hope to create space for empathy, reflection and quietness, hoping others feel touched and seen.

My graduate show installation, ‘Twos’, explores the duality of grief and joy which has defined queer experience for centuries. In a long, cornered space, conversations take place; personal experience meets stories from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, charting connection and loneliness, longing and comfort, fear and desire.

David Gere’s love for his partner Joah Lowe, who died of AIDS in 1988, is memorialised in ‘Corpses Dancing, Dancing Ghosts’. The work on paper is suspended just above head height, compelling viewers to look up to these men who were often looked down upon while alive.