Thomas Pearson | Sylf-Lore
Strathnairn Arts Homestead Gallery 1
Sylf-Lore is first an assembling of painting and glass artwork. This body of work explores the construction of a personal mythology, where memories, objects, and stories of domestic parenthood coalesce with broader inherited mythologies. Domestic representations of environments, my children, family relationships, objects, and everyday materials sit alongside references from religious, classical, and mythological traditions, unified by a responsiveness to class and material culture.
My practice moves between hand-blown glass, painting, and drawing, returning repeatedly to the human figure and the potential of functional objects to reveal personal and shared meaning. The hourglass remains a central motif within my practice: a vessel of time, mortality, and reflection rendered into technically challenging sculptural and figurative forms. However, Sylf-Lore expands this material dialogue, where the hourglass operates as a functional symbol of identity. The hourglass is used to describe a continual movement in which the peripheral fragments of experience, memory, and collective existence are drawn inward by the central organising force, before inevitably dispersing once again. This form explains identity dialectically, as both tightly singular and endlessly plural.
