Pearl Thompson - BA (Hons) Fine Art
‘fractal route routing grow from my blood enter in utero from the spilling of my spinal milk dawn my essence rebirth step through me wander through this feeling start at the pelvis the one that’s been broken through the curve of the spine..’ ​
Pearl Thompson is a worldbuilder who alchemises digital and physical processes to create hybridised sculpture, film and installation works. Within their practise, dreamscapes unfurl where the viewer is led into narrative-laced realms where flora and fauna entwine with the monstrous; collapsing and re-forming in cycles of decay and rebirth.
‘The gorgons turned men who looked into their living, venomous snake encrusted faces into stone. I wonder what might have happened if those men had known how to politely greet the dreadful chthonic ones. I wonder if such manners can still be learned, if there is time to learn, or if the stratigraphy of the rocks will only register the ends and end of a stony anthropos’ -Donna Haraway.
By reconfiguring the monstrous feminine through speculative fabulation, the artist forges new imaginaries, rejecting the patriarchal inscription of womanhood as abject and monstrous by lack or excess. Instead, the feminine monstrous becomes sublime in its boundlessness; fluid and radically transmutational. Through Pearl’s dreamlike workings, women and those who defy the gender binary are no longer passive objects of terror but autonomous forces that compel the viewer to confront their definitions of gender, and the elucidations they hold towards the self. To gaze upon the monstrous in its feminine sublimity is to take part in a primordial sacred rite, to see the abyss, and in doing so be reborn feral, fecund, and unforgivably boundless.
