5 minute read
DEBORAH THOMPSON
Bath of Light, detail of right panel. Photos: Deborah Thompson
Boat Without a Boat
by Susan Andrews Grace
This breakthrough exhibition by Deborah Thompson, Nelson’s Cultural Ambassador for 2024, will occupy both the Reid Room and the West Gallery at Grand Forks Gallery 2 from May 11 to August 3. The boat that is not a boat refers to bodies transporting souls through life in constellations of elaborately drawn and cut paper panels. The exhibition serves as an ark through floods of consciousness, instinct, myth, poetry and history. It takes you through a sea of faces to shores where hair metamorphoses into upright or limp horns, and hands may be claws. Metaphysical playfulness abounds in these works devoid of speciesism.
“Boat Without a Boat” contains speculative narratives about characters who feature in two stop-motion animation videos, a new venture for Thompson. This change in direction began when Naomi Potter, director/curator of the Esker Foundation in Calgary, paid her a studio visit about six years ago. Upon seeing one of the constellations, Potter suggested that Thompson try stop-motion animation, a filmmaking technique that physically manipulates objects in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they appear to exhibit motion or change when played back.
Thompson immediately recognized stop motion as her next step. She studied the work of contemporary South African artist, William Kentridge, whose only tools are charcoal and a camera. Kentridge’s drawing, erasure and photography make cinematic lyric meditations on issues such as apartheid, free-market capitalism and class inequity. The more Thompson looked at Kentridge the more she knew she wanted to draw cinematic meditations about transformation, her perennial subject.
With the assistance of a Canada Council Research and Creation grant in 2021, Thompson hired Nelson filmmaker Brian Lye to mentor her in the basics of camera work, animation software and video editing. He guided her purchase of camera, monitor, Bluetooth remote, laptop with animation software, editing programs and lights. She reorganized her studio to accommodate new equipment, mounting a camera on the ceiling over an animation table. She experimented until she had the right kind of low light to film. She learned the painstaking labour of moving drawn figures, some with hinged arms and legs, through narrative on film. As well, the large, fragile constellations of intricate cut-paper drawings necessitated new methods of storage. Thompson’s drawing process, however, remained the same as ever.
Thompson begins drawing by finding faces that intrigue her in magazines, newspapers and screenshots on the news. She draws a face over and over until it begins to look back at her and no longer remains the face she began with. She then starts the process of cutting and piecing to add a figure and landscape to tell a story, sometimes by camera. Some faces question, glare or squint; the face in the panel Spectral Companions looks blissful. In the video Ritual, a blue angel appears to be asleep while flapping wings/arms. More faces and drawn components spread across the wall as she cuts into the picture plane, adding many interlocking layers of narrative and a landscape for the figure. Human gesture, particularly of the hand, reverberates in the videos. Constellations may be single, double (diptych) or triple (triptych), with some as wide as three metres, her largest works to date.
Thompson is known for her painting of human and other animals floating in the picture plane. Stop-motion animation introduced the necessity of a time horizon and narrative: she needed to know why these characters were moving, what they were moving toward and what they wanted, all critical elements in storytelling. The works have a figure-landscape relationship, she says, in which the land is a body/boat interacting with the figure’s body/boat. Graphite, oil bar, chalk and ink drawings on heavy, coloured papers lend a sombre and monochromatic palette, as opposed to the high-key colour in her paintings. She says: “It was like reducing the volume of the horns and allowing the violins to be heard.”
The grant allowed Thompson to hire Nelson’s world-renowned Graham Tracey for the musical score and other recording. She herself did the diegetic sound (any sound that comes from the world of the video, such as breathing). The video Midden features a poem by Nelson poet Eimear Laffan, read by her.
Ritual (10 minutes, 28 seconds) plays in the West Gallery, a room meant just for video. It features a blue angel and three psychopomps or otherworld guides to cosmic existence. Midden (3 minutes) shows in the large Reid Room. It shows transformation without end: protagonist’s body cycles from animal to plant to reptile aided by a flood and lichen. Death makes room for life.
In my studio visit/interview with Thompson she mentioned that her drawing is inspired by the underdrawing of unfinished paintings by Michelangelo of androgynous figures. For example, The Entombment depicts John the Evangelist and a woman as they carry Jesus up a staircase to the sepulchre. Simon of Arimathea, who lent them the tomb, stands in the background. On the right side of the picture is space for a woman not yet painted, maybe one of the Marys. Thompson admires the underdrawing of bodies, but I could see how the absent figure would also fire her imagination. The Entombment is a religious painting and in many ways Thompson’s constellations and videos also honour the numinous or holy and mysterious. Perhaps Michelangelo’s missing figure has been travelling through the ether and the centuries to appear as a maternal face looking out at the viewer, asking What have you done? or Where am I supposed to be? or What happened? “Boat Without a Boat” would make room in its ark for Michelangelo’s unfinished woman.
Imagine this: figures from unfinished paintings pose in Thompson’s studio, enjoying her gracious hospitality, sipping tea, looking out at her. Meanwhile, an invisible queue of souls in the alley behind her studio wait for auditions.
debthompson.ca, gallery2grandforks.ca
