 Tom's a British artist who studied at Chelsea and the Slade and is currently living in Maine in the United States What's interesting about Tom's work is that he's collecting antique Victorian photographs They were known as cabinet cards Which were actually a development or an evolution from the cart to visit and in the mid to late 19th century The growing middle classes would use these photographs of themselves really is as visiting cards He's very interested in the original sitter. So he instinctively chooses what he feels he can work with So really the interesting thing is that he's bridging 150 years of visual culture here starting with The photographic image going into contemporary painting Interestingly, he also studied sculpture for an MA and so you also get sculptural elements coming into the work For example with this piece here where you can see that he's really engaging with the spatial Sense of the piece. He's taking us through the surface and beyond Tom works with different motifs. You can see that sometimes he'll work with flowers Sometimes with these linear abstract patterns hair these are Exploding geometric clouds and then these pieces are auras one of Tom's main intentions Is to really talk about revealing and concealing so within his work We'll have some subjects that are completely covered in a motif and then others and particularly more recently He started to reveal the subject Previously they most often being completely covered in paint different patterns motifs This piece here for example that features features the exploding geometric cloud is much more about the revealing of the personality of the sitter and I think we also need to think of Tom's work in psychoanalytical terms, you know the cabinet cards were Contemporary contemporaneous to Sigmund Freud and the development of his ideas behind psychoanalysis So we also have this sense of the revealing of the unconscious You know the the id the monster the grotesque The you know that within us which generally is concealed Tom really is in a way is interested in Revealing visually that sense of the unconscious and at the same time of course you also had Victorian freak shows So all of these run alongside side each other the the Victorian photograph cabinet card psychoanalytical ideas and the You know the popularity of freak shows