Susan Thomas^[14]

Susan Thomas is an Auckland based painter. She was raised in Wellington and has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions with works in many private and corporate collections.

Susan Thomas has long worked with themes of human strengths and frailties. The works in this latest show “Moveable Certainty” follow on from “Memory and Other Frailties”, a series related to unreliable narration based on the artist's mother’s deteriorating memory.

This new series of paintings push beyond that into the area of connection / disconnection and cannot fail to be linked to the pandemic where connection with friends and family has been stripped back to the non-physical.

During these times connection is filtered by masks, or a screen. Obscuring the sense of really being with people and leaving room for miscommunication.

If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that connection with our community is possibly the most important thing for us. We want to be with each other. We want to hug and laugh and cry and connect in the physical world.

In these paintings Susan is expressing all of this … the vagaries of memory, the coming and going of people in one’s life; connections made and broken and frayed and pieced back together.