Gilly Thomas is fascinated by the uncanny, the mysterious and chance elements or encounters in the world. These are drawn together into her subconscious and then channeled via her paintings to create intriguing images of atmospheric power, almost all of which highlight incidents relating to the human condition.
The long, deep shadows and elongated perspectives belong to an internal landscape, a hidden though familiar world of the mind. It is a private place beset with darkness and panic, and black jokes at the artist's expense. She watches as she experiments on herself, curious and wounded. At once blessed and cursed with a keen unflinching eye and a fierce observant intelligence. She is left writhing in irony, wreathed in ambiguity. Simultaneously dancing with the joy and reeling from the pain of being here. Being in it, treasuring every agonising minute…
She is a double-act: participating, but simultaneously standing apart observing her participation. She makes work which is both prickly and graceful, fortified with elements of surrealism and absurdity!
"I draw from thinking and remembering, not seeing. Looking for the rightness of configuration of human and landscape space. It feels autonomous, sometimes - uncanny, like language not fully understood. It is textual pleasure. It is better than being possessed by the spirit of the crow and the nameless dread."
Gilly Thomas.
Gilly Thomas lives and works in Llandegai, near Bangor. She was elected to the Royal Cambrian Academy in 2008. She has been exhibiting with us since February 2014 and has exhibited in 2016, 2018 & 2022.