Fern Thomas’s practice plays with ritual, mythmaking, folk magic and folklore. She works with archetypal images, pedagogical spaces and inner landscapes, creating works rooted in a connection to nature and place.
Her work can take the form of sound, object, live action, song and the spoken word. One to one encounters, traditional audience/performer experiences, participatory and socially engaged spaces are some of the ways the work is shared.
Her creative processes can include conjuring imagined encounters with dead animals and the founding of fictional lands and time travelling research units. She incorporates dream work and amateur shamanic journeying as a vital part of her research strategies.
Thomas will often draw on archives, historical ‘facts’ and outmoded forms of knowledge as starting points into what is lost, unknown or unimagined. She is interested in the role of the internal imaginative space as a tool (influenced by her mentor Shelley Sacks), and is increasingly drawn to questions around the relationship between the image and healing.
Recently Thomas’ research has addressed the Phenomenology of Motherhood, with an emphasis on natural rhythms, moments of daily transitions, and ‘Women’s labour’.