Lake Dolly

In much of Christian Thompson’s work he engages with the process of autoethnography, merging the dream world, his autobiography and research, he constructs images that connect his experience to wider social, political, cultural meanings and understandings.

Reflecting on personal, private and public archives, Thompson harnesses his focus on anti portraiture and its ability to trouble the relationship between past and present.

His works hold powerful actions/gestures, drawing relationships between object, body and history. He mediates qualitative explorations and personal experience through his practice, resulting in a myriad of mediums such as photography, sculpture, video and sound.

In his 2017 series Lake Dolly he employs Australian botanicals to arrange on his form as a vessel or armature. The artist draws on disparate themes, using materials that evoke spirituality; the figure is transmogrified into an equally enchanting and haunting form.

Thompson seeks to explore the emotional inner terrain, represented in Lake Dolly through the inserts of plant life, dusk and dawn into the eyes, obscuring his own identity, revealing a rich interior world.

Thompson’s works transcend categorisation, compelling and provocative; he explores the universal human impulse to orient ones self to the world, never static, always evolving, redefining one’s relationships to our internal and external lives.

His works give insight into the practices of the past and simultaneously capture a dynamic modern constancy.