Maggie Thompson has exhibited widely since completing her MA at Manchester School of Art in 2017, and here she presents a set of new and recent prints.
The primary focus of her printmaking practice is etching on steel. For her, this method has a coherence with the subject matter and her underlying thoughts. Often removing only a miniscule amount of material from each identically sized plate, it is what is lost from the surface which is each one’s most defining characteristic.
Maggie’s work is concerned with an exploration of space: transitory liminal space like that found where the land meets the sea; heterotopic space such as that of a journey; and the virtual infinite space of the mind within the finite space of the body.
“It is when driving familiar journeys that my mind wanders farthest. As landscape slips past the window, the patterns of line and shape in my peripheral vision are internalised and remembered, re-emerging in the work I make. Repetitious marks and multiple etchings suggest the body’s repeated actions and the repetitive nature of familiar journeys. These are used to produce meditative prints of an ‘in-between’ place, a ‘heterotopia’: more an idea about space than an actual space.
The imaginary landscapes of journeys are juxtaposed with one another to create the elusive places which I cannot capture with my camera. They do not exist in time. Here a moment can last for hours or an hour can pass in the blink of an eye. They are nowhere, having left but not yet arrived, a space that we travel through: the idea of ‘hypsos’ or a ‘state of transport’. They suggest an imagined geography, somewhere between form and formlessness; somewhere to escape to with our thoughts and memories; in the world but not exactly of it.”
