From Amgueddfa Cymru Collection
Fern Thomas works with sculptures, communities, objects and words to circle themes of place, magic and ecology. Her work draws on deep time and the mythic imagination, alongside folk customs, traditions and place-based practices, grounded in Wales, as a means of thinking through ecological belonging.
Through her work with archaeological collections, she focuses on prehistoric objects, often ritually deposited in water, such as springs, rivers and bogs. These artefacts are approached as speaking to earlier ways of belonging to the land and the more-than-human world. For Fern, water is understood as both a holder of memory and an active force, shaping landscapes and carrying histories that continue to surface in the present moment.
Her projects often extend beyond the gallery and museum, taking place across landscapes and communities, and working with more analogue forms of engagement. They create moments in which objects and stories can be encountered differently, and connections to place take root, opening a broader capacity for care.
Fern is an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher working in partnership with Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales and the University of South Wales. She holds a Masters in Social Sculpture, a territory of transdisciplinary creativity focused on the shaping of a humane and ecologically viable society. She has also undertaken training in celebrancy and ritual facilitation with Dead Good Guides, led by the founders of the experimental theatre collective Welfare State International, and was among the first in Wales to be selected for the Emergence Magazine Seeds of Radical Renewal Leadership programme, rooted in the field of spiritual ecology.
She has been the recipient of a Future Wales Fellowship (Arts Council of Wales and Natural Resources Wales) and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award, and previously held a Freelands Artist Programme Fellowship (g39 Cardiff & Freelands Foundation) and a Jerwood Bursary, supporting research into magic, healing and folklore in relation to museum collections.