Thom Buchanan

Sunshine Coast National Art Prize 2024 - Finalist

_{[Image courtesy of the artist]}

Artist Statement

fractural paradigm explores the impact of humanity on the environment built and rebuilt. Drawing the viewer through an imaginative timescale that encompasses future built environments - utopian and dystopian - and the layered pasts I feel we still inhabit. Any future vision should attempt to communicate with and through the thousands of years of history that precedes it, from Indigenous understandings and uses of place through to contemporary migrant experiences. Creating images that work both away and towards, into past and future, using fusion and decay. There are tensions between natural and built environments, between moving forward and being still, between the living and the dead. 

Strong attention to the vanishing point is always an invitation to enter the work, I believe metamorphosis of place addresses just such tensions. Asking the viewer to be conscious of built environments as constructed spaces in time, and to push toward their own vision. How do we create a future landscape that understands its history and takes responsibility for the past and for future generations? What new custodial relationships will be needed for a changing climate? I believe it is the role of the artist to contemplate such questions.