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Austin Thomas
Being an artist is about creating a community and contributing to that community. It is also about making good work and doing-it-yourself. Artists have to be in charge of their own artistic development and they have to chart their own path. These are the words I work by, whether building social sculptures or making works on paper.
Although often sculptural and programmatic (I run a salon-based gallery and work on public sculptural projects), my work is ultimately rooted in drawing. I have invented a way of sketching that involves manipulating (curving and cutting) rulers and other straight-edged implements and stencils into crooked delicate shapes. I call the end result “unstraightline” drawings, for life is not a perfect trajectory.
From these drawn paths, I create delicate arrangements with sometimes modest three-dimensional elements. These I think of as “sculptural collages.” Over the past three years, I have filled many sketchbooks. My pages of patterned circles and lines are like writing. I am focused on making pocket utopias on paper, as sculptural and in an exhibition space.
