About

Artist Statement

I really love Nature, it’s many moods and all the flora and fauna.  When we leave it to its own devices, it forms this perfectly balanced, harmonious system, a miraculous melding of biology and magic.  It has the immense power to soothe or in the very next breath, seethe with a sudden fury…and it takes you along for the ride!   It truly is the boss of us mere mortals.  I find myself marvelling at it and then fretting about it’s fate and the effects on the human condition, as we experience climate change and all too frequent natural disasters. I often think…where do we go from here?

Thankfully I have an escape route!   I’m so grateful to have the ability to funnel much of my angst, joy and curiosities into creating my process driven, fictional, alternate worlds.  Populated with invented biomorphics, imagined dwellings, amorphic beings and hybrid creatures. Darkness and light, all welcome here!  I allow for happenstance and am so often rewarded with unexpected surprises, as images float into being, of their own volition.  I try not to overthink, over finesse, or over edit.  That way, I see the work as fresh, true and alive, not static.  After all, Nature is not composed, nor is it symmetrical.  It moves us, is unpredictable and gives us a sense of wonder.

 

Bio

Tracy Thomson, AOCA, CSPWC, is a Toronto artist, who studied Fine Art, then switched to Experimental Art in her last year of study at OCA, in order to, “explore, what was in the abstract empty space surrounding the figure, minus the figure”. The Stewart building (which housed the Experimental Art Department) provided large studios in which to do so.  

Tracy currently works out of her studio situated on the shores of Lake Ontario, which she finds constantly inspiring as well as treacherous, in its immense power and ever-changing moods.  

She considers herself a “Biomorphic Expressionist” with Environmental leanings.  Though she loves nature and has a long family art historical attachment to the landscape, she strongly claims she is NOT a landscape painter. “I don’t have an interest in painting what’s in front of me, as it already exists in a pure poetic form which I cannot improve upon. I do, however, LOVE to explore the mysteries of what doesn’t yet exist but what I imagine MAY exist in future.  I want to feel moved, confused, consoled and intrigued, even a little frightened, by my invented worlds”.

Set within fictional future communities, Tracy creates a heightened, otherworldly scenario, ripe with amorphic beings, invented organics and fictional dwellings, where humour, joy and pathos coexist.   

These visual proposals are meant to engage our collective environmental consciousness while simultaneously inspiring a sense of wonder. 

CV