The fourth BCN artist in residence to inhabit the studio at The Wolverhampton School of Art is Molly Thompson. Below you can read a short interview with the artist on her practice.
Molly Thompson's work explores preservation as a tool for recalling lived narratives in conceptual forms, connecting sound, film, and sculptures. By creating ambiguous narratives around personal experiences, she observes the synchronicities with memories being fiction and/or phantoms. She is drawn to the past as an uncanny feeling, relying on found materiality as a pillar of storytelling which all seem arbitrary. The works are preserved as something beautifully tragic.
Multistory: What drew you to sculpture as a practice, and what informs your choice of materials?
Molly: Using found/existing materiality becomes sculpture-led practice, surrounding objects fabricated to express lived narratives and agendas. The sculpture was a way to introduce physicality between reality and the false narrative, it was the way my practice started to express the real-world landscapes in the work existed from.
— my practice centers around existing materials and factors in the labour of the West Midlands landscape. The work uses moving images and kinetic elements to honour economic factors within the sculptures. The work is often site-specific and of a temporal nature to capture the vast ever-changing social and physical climate. I tend to focus on the value of metal as a material with links to locational identity to the industrial past subverting the use of minimal sculptures into contemporary acknowledgements of situational identity.
The work is conjured from personal, lived narratives and how to relay that moment to an audience. Through studio-led practice, sculptures are constructed to determine if the memory is real or false based on the objectivity associated with it. The work is a self-portrait abstracted through materiality, creating a local discourse between commodity and value. It's embedded and subtracted from where it was originally permitted, transferring the outside in and vice versa.
Multistory: You've spoken about how your work responds deeply to place and is often shaped by your surroundings. What inspires you when you dream up new work?
Molly: keep returning to watch that landscape to watch it change. That place exists beyond the context of artwork, yet I feel as if I must subject it to an artwork. Recently I’ve been inspired by canal walks, personally taking a liking to a burnt-out car especially. I’ve been watching that car being slowly stripped of parts such as its aluminium. The need to abstract and replicate starts by exploring the existing materials context and feelings on myself. I believe the landscape I draw inspiration from is deeply rooted in the foundational aspects of industrial/laborious remains, most people whether it be artists or the people have a deep connection to these rotting/underfunded places. Transferring the work into a minimalist and contemporary setting is situated in the knowledge that the type of artwork is deemed ‘inaccessible’ to the masses. So, by transferring place into a modern setting it is confronting the understanding that everyday life can be represented as art, in my case sculptural works.
Circulating back to the first question, sculptural practice is what I believe captures this work the best. It's confronting and abstracting the landscape, my little pocket of dissected places that can be real and or false. When I talk about ‘real’ or ‘false’ I’m touching on that in my practice some work I make is so far from the source material it can be classed as a ‘false’ narrative. However, I believe this is beneficial to my practice as it allows the audience to find what they associate with without me dictating the context. I don’t want to tell the context so much as I want people to find whatever they want with my practice even if they hate it.
Multistory: What was your focus for this residency?
Molly: During the residency my focus was to explore movements, I focused a lot on breathing and air. I feel there’s something beautiful and tragic with sculptures that appear to be living whilst they aren’t. In my materiality I try to manipulate the non-living into living. I think I do this to comment on the ‘real’ and ‘false’ as I stated earlier.
I tried to create something minimal for residency whilst allowing the materials to dictate themselves and change to experiment. I was heavily inspired by not only the landscape but also the idea presented by Derrida that ‘I see preservation as a way of holding onto experiences that might otherwise fade’.
I focused a lot on a burnt-out car I found on my walks that was there for months, but funnily enough after completing the residency and the work I took a walk to see the car to find it had been taken away. It was almost bitter-sweet. The work almost feels like a haunting of what it was. The breathing airbags were inspired by the impact of this burnt car, it was all about a momentary impact.
Multistory: Where would you like to go next with your practice?
Molly: The future of my practice is to explore processes beyond the surface level, to mimic and abstract place and time beyond the visual point. Now, after the residency, I’ve been exploring freezing techniques inspired by frozen factory roofs. I’m beginning to form techniques exclusive to my practice. Instead of being inspired by other creatives, I’m turning towards techniques that mimic the outside in contemporary forms.
I want the future of my practice to expand through public display of works, really exploring the outside in and vice versa. I think now I’m exploring this on a small scale, I would love to transfer bigger ideas into reality (with funding). I want to explore those sustainable ways of creating work and developing practice whilst maintaining connections.
Find Molly Thompson on her website and on Instagram.