Ian Thomas Art

"Dancing in the Moonlight" is a celebration of our vibrant and diverse queer community, an ode to the joy and resilience that binds us under the moonlit sky. It honours the power of love and the solidarity that emerges from shared experiences.

Each piece is a vibrant testament to the kaleidoscopic spectrum of queerness - a gathering of identities that bloom like wildflowers, unapologetically colourful and diverse. Just as the moonlight illuminates the darkness, our queer community sheds light on the world with resilience and a radiant spirit that transcends boundaries.

Highlighting often overlooked narratives, the work references the transformative energy and boundless creativity of the Northern Rivers queer communities.

In a shared space of colour and exhilaration, I’d like to acknowledge the fearlessness of queer elders who paved the way, the unity of coming together and the strength that comes from being unapologetically, authentically, and joyfully ourselves.

This work uses a visual language inspired by the Pearly Kings and Queens of London. Their rich history dates back to the Coster Kings, who managed London’s street traders from the 16th century wearing an informal uniform embellished with stripes of pearl buttons.

In the 1870s, the first Pearly King, Henry Croft, appropriated this to a whole new level by sewing 30,000 pearly buttons onto a basic suit and hat which he wore while raising money to support his local community.

The tradition lives on with 30 Pearly royal families recognised in the capital, all devoted to charitable works, with their status denoted by their pearly suits and accessories.

I live the transgressive act of the Pearlies – declaring themselves royalty; providing support for their communities because government does not; but most of all, for their couture-level decoration of the sad, camouflaging, everyday black suit.

For the purposes of this work, I’ve chosen to read this class action as a queering of norms – taking the most humble of materials and converting the most conservative uniform of heteronormativity into a spectacular camp showpiece.

The texts I’ve chosen to work with come from various sources – Susan Sontag’s 1964 ‘Notes on “Camp”’; buttons, banners and organisations from the queer protest movement of the 70s and 80s; contemporary Nigerian designer, Adebayo Oke-Lawal’s radical repositioning of menswear for his Orange Culture fashion house; through to more general references we use to celebrate queer community today.

Grateful thanks and acknowledgement to the queer pioneers of the past six decades who made exhibitions like this possible.

Growing up on the outskirts of London, the occasional sighting of a Pearly King and Queen was both a jarring display of otherness and everything I needed to satisfy my love of glittering sparkly embellishment.

‍The Pearly Kings and Queen have a rich history dating back to the Coster Kings, who managed London’s street traders from the 16th century wearing an informal uniform embellished with stripes of pearl buttons.

‍In the 1870s, the first Pearly King, Henry Croft, appropriated this to a whole new level by sewing 30,000 pearl buttons onto a basic suit and hat which he wore while raising money to support his local community. The tradition lives on to this day with 30 Pearly royal families recognised in the capital, all devoted to charitable works with their status denoted by their pearly suits and accessories.

‍The tradition lives on to this day with 30 Pearly royal families recognised in the capital, all devoted to charitable works with their status denoted by their pearly suits and accessories.

‍I love the transgressive act of the Pearlies – declaring themselves royalty, providing support for their communities because government does not, but most of all, for their couture-level embellishment of the most conservative uniform of heteronormativity – the black suit.

‍For the purposes of this work, I’ve chosen to read this class action as a queering of norms – taking the most humble of materials, multiple cheap pearly buttons, and converting the sad, camouflaging everyday suit into a spectacular camp showpiece.

‍“The pearl principle – no inner irritation, no pearl” (Surya Das) is a perfect metaphor for the beauty of contemporary queer community and this work is in large part a celebration of that.

Once a year, my mum descended the stairs of our suburban semi-detached house dressed for the annual dinner and dance at the insurance company where my father spent his entire working life. She was the most exquisitely glamorous creature I had ever seen in my life. Preparing for the evening involved weeks of work – the whirring of her Singer sewing machine late at night as the dress came to life; the selection of glamour-on-a-budget shoes, bag and jewellery. And I lived for it.

“Like charity, I believe glamour should begin at home.” Loretta Young

Maybe I selfishly wished my mum was something more than a secretary and my dad was a little more interesting than a life insurance clerk. I wanted for them, and more importantly, for myself, “…an existence so far removed from all menial necessities that clothes can be worn which make any kind of physical labour difficult if not impossible. Dress of this kind, so long as it is manifestly sumptuous, marks the wearer as a member or a dependant of the leisure class, or at least as somebody who for a time can ‘dress the part’ of a member of that class. We admire the clothes of indolence almost instinctively, feeling them to be elegant and dignified, belonging as it were, to a world in which the wolf has been kept far from the door.” Quentin Bell, On Human Finery

Looking back, I see those momentary glimpses of glamour as a window into a new life where I had escaped the choking boredom of the English suburbs. The annual hints of sumptuous fabric and the sparkle of costume jewellery grew into a lifelong obsession with the transformative nature of fashion and a desire to escape to a more fabulous world.

“Glamour, that trans-human aura or power to attract imitation, is a kind of vessel into which dreams are poured... Glamour is the power to rearrange people's emotions...” Arthur Miller

This show is a love letter to my mum who left us last year; to sequins, shimmer and the froth of tulle; and to every little queer kid who knows the pleasure of playing furtively with their mum’s jewellery box. Sewing, pinning, tying, crafting and signifiers of domesticity are mimicked, retraced and abstracted, honouring traditions associated with the home and the woman who maintained mine. In its essence, it is about touch, the transient nature of fabric and memory, and a reconnection to childhood escapism and dreams of glamour.

“I think glamour all the time. I wake up in the morning and I'm already thinking glamour.” Donatello Versace

This work was produced during a one month residency at Factory49 in Paris.

Working Monday to Friday for three weeks, one work was completed each day. 15 days; 15 panels of 3m of rice paper; 30 circles on each, templated from a 45rpm vinyl record. 450 circles, each originally a perfect shape, repeated over and over with inherent imperfections. The perfect becoming less than perfect. The mechanical interrupted by the human hand. Presence and absence. Positive and negative. Repetition mirrored and refracted.

Ian Thomas has an obsession with circles, incessantly drawing them in row of thee becomes an unthinking act after a while, semi-mechanised even, given that the circles are traces of vinyl records - 12”, 10” and 7” - drawn at different speeds, naturally; the artists’s body the arm across a (turn)table, his hand its stylus.

In Chinese philosophy, there is a belief in the ‘continuity of being’, in which all human action is continuous with ministrations of the natural and artificial worlds, connected by flows of energy, without source nor end. A Eurocentric reading of Thomas;s work will see him striving towards a state of being that is represented by a circular system of energy flows in equilibrium: each circle a self-sufficient world interacting with others without losing its identity.

Thomas’s circles however refuse this stability in their doubled, repeated, slipped and messy appearances. They bleed, splatter, disappear and rub up against each other like a swarm of bees. Their senses of self, dispositions and locations are not predetermined but emergent from the overall movement of the multitude, arriving from the artists’s hand and body in an act of material discovery of difference, in which error, variation and serendipity thrive.

The circles jostle, perhaps not for space, but to make space. And all of this in the presence of the frame, the conventional boundary of art making. In spite of this, and as though indifferent, the circles are never broken by the frame. The circles themselves have indeterminate relations with each other, moving between presence as dark line work, and absence as white shadows that do not completely map on. There is no assimilation here, only fierce conversations with art where they resist being the interior of a painting, where there is a healthy disrespect for their framing. The circles constantly speak across their frames, to the next work, and the next surface. In fact, it is circles all the way to the next wall, into the gallery, to the world.

Prof Stephen Loo
UNSW Art & Design

Everything We Never Talked About was commissioned by the Inner West Council. On display from 6 February to 2 April 2019 and timed to coincide with Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the work was a composite of nearly 400 individual works on postcard sized boards. I made it in an attempt to reconnect with my sixteen year old psyche. It was a reimagining of the gay adolescence I never had, being a closeted teenager who came out late in life. The work gave me a safe space to finally acknowledge all my teenage crushes, my hopes and dreams and my innermost thoughts - the kind of things I might have stuck on my bedroom wall, if I wasn’t desperately trying to hide the fact that I was a queer kid. Viewers who took time to stop and look discovered a combination of collage, found images and paintings that acted as a personal celebration of the spirit, colour and joy of the gay community. It featured once-negative names and labels that the queer community has reclaimed; figures from classical sculpture and art - “my pre-internet porn”; bad jokes and puns; all the sparkly things that little boys are taught not to like; symbols of connectivity alongside words of positivity subverted from negative reactionary newspaper headlines; and ‘messages from the future’ as evidence that a life lived as a gay man is just as emotionally rich as anyone else’s.

 Established in 2011 with support from Arts NSW and the City of Sydney, Inner West Council's award-winning Newtown ArtSeat offers a space where experimental and non-commercial art can be showcased. The site is highly visible and exposes any artwork that is displayed in the structure to thousands of passers-by each day. 

Pop art was never a movement. It didn’t have a manifesto and the artists that were grouped under the label – Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg and numerous lesser names - while celebrating and exploring pop culture, often had divergent practices. What they all had in common was a fascination with ‘low-brow’ commercial mass production which they chewed up and spat out in their own unique way.

“While the characteristics of pop art vary greatly from artist to artist, some recurring features include a collage or pinboard-like accumulation of imagery, frontal compositions with compressed perspective, bright colours, a graphic sensibility, the use of text, and subjects that are immediately recognisable despite often having been translated across various mediums from their original source”.

This was never intended to be a ‘pop’ show. I just realised that over the past couple of years I’ve been chewing up similar source materials and trying my hand with similar techniques. I’ve always been drawn to the cute and the kitsch and the mass-produced, and this seemed like an appropriate time to mix it up with all the sparkly things I tried so hard not to like as a little boy.

A group exhibition for Mardi Gras 2018 at M.Contemporary, Woollahra

These pictures are about places and journeys - some literal and some metaphorical. They're about moments and people and pixellations of good times and happy travels. They map adventures and experiences on journeys that always ended safe and sound. Where safe is a place; safe is a state of mind; safe is the way home.

"I scarcely know where to begin, but love is always a safe place", EMILY DICKINSON

When I started these paintings I wanted to do something repetitive and almost mechanical. A bit like knitting but with paint. It felt like a way of creating order and serenity in a crazy period of my life.

And while I soon got bored with the idea, I read a lot about Agnes Martin who did exactly that so well. I came across this quote from her. “Until you can clear up your true identity you will be tied to a repetition of this life”.

So these paintings became a way of marking the changes I make as I try to avoid repeating the past and do things differently. They’re about the people and places and ideas that were part of those changes.

Some were good decisions. Some weren’t.

- This has been a year of huge change. It began for me with a frenetic few months of adrenalin-fuelled monster highs and monster lows that settled into a landing where life returned to something approaching normality. A new normality. And that quieter place was where I chose to make these pictures from, maybe as a way of trying to stay there and preserve it.

- One of my favourite records is Vespertine by Bjork. She described it as “being on your own in your house…and whispering for a year and just writing a very peaceful song that tiptoes”. That’s what I wanted to show. I thought I was making pictures that would tiptoe into the gallery and whisper rather than shout. It’s pretty clear to me now I did nothing of the sort.

- I started using a typewriter because I enjoy how it lets me produce mechanical repetitions that are never quite the same. A dodgy old typewriter with a dried up ribbon gives you spacing that’s never quite even; marks that are never quite identical; and evidence that a human hand had a part in making those marks. Blow them up and they break down even further.

- And typewriters act as a perversely pleasing reminder of my age. My mum was a typist. My dad used a dictaphone and his correspondence was transcribed by members of a nameless female typing pool. And I used a manual typewriter every day in my first job at the BBC. I didn’t grow up in the world of computers and cell phones and the internet. I knew life before.

- In a silly coincidence, at the same time as spending hours punching at typewriter keys, I came across David Malouf’s beautiful book of poems, “Typewriter Music”. I fell in love with one called ‘Revolving Days’. “Revolving days. My heart /in my mouth again. I’m writing this for you, wherever/you are…It is me,/I’m still here…And no, at this/distance, I’m not holding my breath for a reply”. And then I shamelessly stole all my titles from his book.

- Earlier this year I spent a lonely week in Budapest. It was cold and grey, and I was exhausted. I saw an incredibly sad exhibition of paintings by Endre Bálint at the Hungarian National Gallery. I copied down this quote. “I always wanted to be somewhere else rather than where I was and not even there”. When I began making these pictures it made a lot of sense to me. I’m not sure now.

- In this period of slowly settling change, I like the idea that one day I’ll hear a whisper in my ear that says, “You’re OK. And everything is going to be alright”. I know that’s something I’m supposed to know myself, but just occasionally it would nice to hear it from someone else. These pictures are about some of the people who I thought might have done the whispering. And wondering how it might have felt to hear that. 

I was fortunate to have travelled quite a lot during the previous twelve months. Work, pleasure, family and significant birthdays took me to places I'd always wanted to visit as well as some I know well and have been to before.

Some of these trips were longer, letting me get the sense of actually living somewhere, but more often they were  two, three, four or five night stays where you get a quick sense of a place, but never have time to fully explore.

Either way, I love the experience of travel. I love airports, hotels, finding a good coffee, researching, exploring, walking, galleries, cycling, shopping, photographing, eating and drinking my way round anywhere new.

And I love that sense of disconnection that comes with travel - never really belonging and scratching the surface, but being somehow adrift from your everyday life and not really a part of the one that you've touched down on temporarily.

I love maps - and building a picture of cities and connections.  Which isn't to say that they're much use to me. I struggle with lefts and rights, have no sense of direction and generally find my way around by creating my own visual landmarks. But I enjoy the order of maps and their imposition of logic despite the fact that they dissolve into chaos when I try to read them on the move.

I love the way that time slips when you travel. Coming from Australia to Europe or to the USA, inevitably you lose time as you gain time. Whole days disappear and jetlag gives you access to early mornings and the space to wander and get lost in silent cities as they come to life. And somehow days become longer as they become shorter so that time seems to blur and foreshorten while you're on the move, but thinking back to the day you left always feels like a lifetime away.

And I love the way that travel gives you just a glimpse of places. You can visit but you can never know what it's like to have grown up somewhere, to have family roots and connections in places. It's nice to pretend, to stay a month and feel like you almost belong, but roots take time and a glimpse is all you leave with.

So that's what these pictures were about - my experience of travel. Of being lost, scratching surfaces, peering round corners and time and order collapsing in on themselves. And also, about being home and knowing your place until the next time you pack a bag and take off again.

The paintings were inspired by a quote from Ian McEwan's, The Innocent - “…nothing that ever mattered could ever happen here”. It reminded me of Worcester Park, the sleepy dormitory town where I grew up in the 1960s. 

It always felt to me that if you wanted to say to a child, “Your life is going to be very ordinary; expect nothing, aim low and you won’t be disappointed”, then Worcester Park was the perfect place to raise them. 

20 minutes on the trains which thundered past the end of our garden twice every hour, took you to Waterloo – gateway to the swinging sophistication that was London. But day to day, life was pretty ordinary and London was a long, long way away. 

I left many years ago ago and put a very, very long distance between myself and home. In my mind I quietly blamed Worcester Park for things that never quite worked out, for never being exactly who I wanted to be and for missing out on the chances I never had. 

And then one day, I went back to visit. And found it wasn’t as bad as I remembered. And when I spent some time fishing around, I discovered that some incredibly interesting people also had their roots in my hometown – people who could never have become who they became if Worcester Park was as dull as I remembered. 

So this year I started painting pictures which took the town as their starting point - referencing Google Earth, railway station maps and the words and faces of those interesting ex-residents. 

And that's what I'll be showing in this exhibition - I suppose as something of an apology for bad-mouthing Worcester Park for the past 20 years. Sorry, if you're listening. 

Driving back from the South Coast a year or so ago, I heard a song on the radio that lodged itself in my brain. “Is that all there is?”, written by Lieber and Stoller, and recorded by Peggy Lee in 1969, is a wonderfully miserable lyric which has no place in a pop song.

I was doubly pleased to discover that the pop song that had no place being a pop song was based on a short story – Disillusionment by Thomas Mann - a most unlikely starting point for what was to become a number one on Billboard’s adult contemporary singles chart. Having spent many of my tortured teenage years ploughing through the collected works of Mann, the coincidence was inspired and a connection was forged.

The whole idea became something of a life lesson. You’ll know what I mean if, like me, you’re one of the glass half-empty people who understands the need, but has to work hard, to feel like one of the glass half-full people

I began making pictures that related to the song which in turn related to the story and started with a series of minimal text pieces. These were partnered with five paintings based on short quotes from Mann’s story, with the sentiment of the quote contradicted by a clumsy approximation of a Chinese symbol.

The rest of the work grew out of this, taking more of Mann’s quotes as their start points, some as variations on one sketch and some using prints of Disillusionment, where the text is shredded and randomly reassembled. I like that even here, where the narrative has disappeared, you can still sense the tone of the story and that nagging question, “Is that all there is?”

‘No Smoking’ was a group of energetic, freehand abstracts, using acrylic, collage, oil stick, graphite and ink on canvas.

I know it’s not very conceptual or post-modern but my paintings are always a reflection of what’s happening in my life – emotionally, practically and physically. And the last twelve months have been a little turbulent, hence the roughness and raw edges in these new paintings.

’No smoking’ was an instruction to myself. It refers to an interview with author, Grahame Greene, whose work seemed relevant to the last year of my life. He said that his great struggle was to avoid allowing his more confused characters to ‘smoke their stories dry like a fish’.

And so I took this on, and chose to do the same. To stop ‘smoking the pictures dry’, I set myself certain working rules.

To add history to the paintings, all of the collaged elements had to have had a previous life – so I picked up fabrics and text from op shops and garage sales. The colour palette is much brighter than my usual work, because I ‘quoted’ colour combinations – some from a vivid body of Aboriginal paintings which I came across in Melbourne earlier this year and some from street art in Melbourne laneways. I worked the paint quickly and freely to keep the paintings open and energetic. And I chose to add an emotional layer to the work by incorporating text from a number of letters and messages I’d saved from the people closest to me. 

The end result was 25 paintings which surprised me by being so vivid and vibrant. Each hides and exposes its own story, offering glimpses of memory and experience in layers of texture, collage and paint.

These paintings were a response to a list of quotes from various sources which I had accumulated over the last 2 years. You know when you read something, or someone says something or writes something, and you understand instinctively what they mean – that’s what these pictures were about. 

They acknowledge that sometimes other people describe your own emotions or feelings or experiences in a much more powerful way than you can yourself. And it hits you in the chest when you realise that their words are as much about you as they are about them. 

Each of the paintings responded to a different quote and was intended to work not as an illustration, but as an image to accompany the title. So the titles came first and the paintings were then approached as a kind of meditation on the thought or emotion behind the title. 

The circles are a recurring theme that I had been working with for some time. Their meaning has changed over the years – sometimes denoting absence, sometimes denoting our social sphere and the way we interact with others, and in these recent paintings, as a means to delve beyond the surface to what lies below. I continue using circles because they are just a beautiful graphic shape to work with – the simplest, most perfect form. 

The paintings are constructed from a starting point of numerous layers of rice paper. Circles are drawn onto the underside of the rice paper in charcoal and are then attached to canvas using shellac varnish. I then work onto the rice paper with various media, generally leaving the circles as a blank counterpoint or with a translucent glaze of colour, so that there’s a sense of seeing through from the surface of the work to another, somewhat obscure, level below.

These paintings are an exploration of the way we operate in society and the difference between introverts and extroverts. The circles represent our spheres of influence and the degree to which we recharge our batteries internally or externally.

"[Introversion] is normally characterized by a hesitant, reflective, retiring nature that keeps itself to itself, shrinks from objects, is always slightly on the defensive and prefers to hide behind mistrustful scrutiny. [Extraversion] is normally characterized by an outgoing, candid, and accommodating nature that adapts easily to a given situation, quickly forms attachments, and, setting aside any possible misgivings, will often venture forth with careless confidence into unknown situations."
(The Problem of the Attitude-Type, CW 7, par. 62. Sharp on Jung)

The paintings in this show were inspired by an antique brooch given to me by an ex partner, which reads “May the Lord watch over us while you and I are absent one from the other”. 

At the time it just seemed romantic, but when I came across the brooch again recently, it felt as if recent events had given it a whole new layer of meaning. Living through a period in world history where so many people are absent before their time, because they were in Bali or the World Trade Centre at the wrong time; or because they were born in Baghdad or Basra, or because they were infected with HIV or SARS; or because they had no access to clean water or too much access to hard drugs; there are too many reasons and too many absences in the world as a result. 

So the paintings themselves are about memory, mourning and accidents of fate. They are painted in minor key colours and tones with surfaces which are weathered and aged for the passing of time. They use bits and pieces of found materials, each of which is marked in some way by another person, some evidence of a life lived. The materials are nothing special and nothing precious, just regular day to day junk. But when you cut them out, mix them up and reassemble them, they fall into place and form their own stories.

There are Miss Havisham laces and hand-written notes from people long gone. There are pieces of fabric from garments which marked the high points of other lives, but which have now unravelled into frayed decay. And there are symbols of Christian mourning - funeral notices, wreaths, flowers and birds carrying souls to the next place. 

There is a sadness, but also the deep-rooted emotional certainty which acknowledges that the time ‘while you and I are absent one from the other’ will one day come to an end.

The title refers to an Arabic proverb – “Never buy fish that are still in the sea” – meaning don’t take unnecessary risks and wait till the fish have been landed until you part with your cash.

I only discovered painting around 3 years ago and since then I haven’t really stopped. As my style has developed, I’ve increasingly used painting to express things which I’ve previously kept hidden – emotions, issues and personal stuff which seem to find their way into my work.

Themes which come through continually are about life in the city, separation from my English roots and family, my new life and family in Australia, and the slightly corny concepts of love, truth and beauty. 

Having hit the landmark age of 40 this year, painting has become a way of taking more and more risks by exposing myself through my work. This peeling away of layers has been a very liberating and enjoyable experience which I intend to continue through this body of work.

For me, painting is about buying fish while they’re still in the sea – taking risks and relishing the consequences.  

Fossick is based on little pieces of other peoples' experience - their marks and memories, everyday possessions and the things they leave behind. They’re nothing special and nothing precious - just the regular flotsam of the day to day. But when you cut them up and reassemble them, they fall into place and form their own narrative. And it never fails to surprise me how these proofs of lives lived help me define moments in mine.