Digital Light Pool XXXIX

Hayley Tompkins (1971 - )

Acrylic on plastic

2013

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  • About the work
    Location
    Country: UK
    City: London
    Place: Department of Health and Social Care, 39 Victoria Street
    Hayley Tompkins makes lo-fi works that sit somewhere between a painting and an object. Each of the works featured here, which she calls Digital Light Pool are delicately coloured and textured. Tompkins creates these works by applying and then swishing around layers of acrylic paint in clear plastic trays. As the colours are left to settle over time, they form abstract compositions.
     
    The nature of Tompkins’ abstract, somewhat lyrical, imagery is derived from and inspired by online searches where she finds secondhand pictures of pebbles, rainbows, cityscapes and everyday objects. Influenced by the visual images she collects, Tompkins creates a unique amalgam of what appears to be natural and artificial forms, contrasting a sense of lightness with weight. She has said of her works:

    Content is something previously seen, thought, felt, dreamed of, which is then being re-constructed or re-imagined. I make these things to loosely enmesh myself in reality and to express positive doubt.

    Tompkins arrangements of colour encourage us to disentangle associations from the work that go beyond the purely visual. In this slippage between the mundane and the sublime, from micro to macro, they create an ambiguous sensation of looking at grains of sand or a skyful of stars. 

  • About the artist
    Hayley Tompkins was born in Leighton Buzzard and currently lives and works in Glasgow. She has a BA in Painting, and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art. Solo exhibitions of her work include shows at Bonner Kunsteverein, Bonn (2018), Lulu, Mexico City (2016), The Drawing Room, Hamburg and The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2015), Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2013) and Studio Voltaire, London (2011). Recent group exhibitions include participation in Filette at Francesca Pia, Zurich (2018), New Past: Contemporary Art from Britain at the Art Gallery of Uzbekistan, Tashkent (2016), The British Art Show (2015/16), the Venice Biennale (2013) and the 30th São Paulo Biennale (2012).
  • Explore
    Places
    Subjects
    abstract
    Materials & Techniques
    plastic, acrylic (paint), acrylic painting
  • Details
    Artist
    Hayley Tompkins (1971 - )
    Title
    Digital Light Pool XXXIX
    Date
    2013
    Medium
    Acrylic on plastic
    Dimensions
    height: 47 cm; width: 33.7 cm; depth: 5.6 cm
    Acquisition
    Purchased from The Modern Institute, March 2016
    Provenance
    The Modern Institute, Glasgow
    GAC number
    18681