(click image for more details)Constellation with yellow eyes, 2008
oil on canvas
100cm x 80cm
Twin-face constellation, 2008
100cm x 80cm
Vanitas with Skull and Smiley Face, 2007
140cm x 100cm
Mimei Thompson's work delves deep into a dark underworld where brush and pen marks coalesce into distorted faces, body parts and organic forms. These alien sprites are in a constant state of flux and unrest, monsters of the id that rail against the pictorial frame like untamed scientific specimens pounding against the glass walls of a bell jar. Blurring the natural and the supernatural, her work is an investigation of psychological spaces and of raw, untamed energy.
Her mark-making and palette is both intricate and seductive and the fact that Thompson describes her working method as knowingly sensual is integral to and reflects her subject matter: the whole life cycle from conception
through to birth, reproduction, decay and death are present in the restless maelstrom of the phantasmagorical primordial swamp she depicts.
Her amorphous bodies are simultaneously fecund and tumorous, not sure whether to (self) replicate or destroy one another. They are products of a mad, bad science, plucked from the depths of our consciousness, where the beautiful and the grotesque vie for premier position through a process of (un)natural selection.
Paul Stone, 2008
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find out more about Paul Stone
