STILL AND ALWAYS features a suite of new works from Elizabeth Thomson alongside a selection of earlier works from her personal archive. Like a series of underground taproots – tendrils simultaneously stretching back into the past while reaching towards the future – this exhibition traces those formative experiences and burgeoning ideas that have continued to propagate throughout the artist’s decades long practice.
Thomson’s work is deeply embedded in the landscape, with the artist often drawing upon cellular and aerial photographic imagery to highlight the inherent patterns and structures found in nature, and conversely, in celebration of its sublime and constituent chaos. Works often recall Thomson’s real-life expeditions across great expanses of terra firma or navigating vast bodies of foreign water, but they also act as backdrops for the artist’s own inner voyage through the volatile terrain of her own memory and subconscious.
Thomson’s early years were spent exploring the Titirangi bush in Tāmaki Makaurau, where the dark damp earth and dense glistening foliage housed all manner of flora and fauna, and which for a small child seemed to harbour endless possibilities for both danger and discovery. On the islands of New Caledonia, the artist encountered plagues of giant insects, mosquitos, and brightly coloured reptiles, watching them crawling, humming, and slithering with a mixture of apprehension and thrilling curiosity. During a visit to the United States, Thomson observed the great snaking form of The Colorado River, whose waters carved out The Grand Canyon over the course of millions of years. She photographed mineral deposits in The Atacama Desert in the north of Chile – one of the driest places on the planet – where bright turquoise lagoons contrast starkly with the white of salt flats and the burnt orange and tan of the surrounding landscape. Thomson travelled to Rangitāhua/Kermadec Islands with a group of artists as part of a conservation initiative, where she found herself swimming in deep blue waters hundreds of kilometres from the safety of dry land. In the Queensberry Hills of Central Otago, looking up the basin toward Lake Hawea, Thomson was awed by the way the light changed abruptly to produce deep shadows and a cubistic patchwork of plantings, grapevines and shelterbelts. Most recently, Thomson voyaged to Antarctica and was deeply affected by the sensory experience of the landscape; mesmerised by patterns in the ice formed from wind and water, those shapes and fissures created as pack ice breaks away, and the monumental forms of floating icebergs.
