Tom Maguire (SA)

We Didn't Expect It Would Be So Beautiful - Front Gallery Nov 2020

Tom Maguire’s painting practice is initially inspired by the experience of travel and lived adventure. Working in response to both direct experience and with references to details of the remote Australian bush or uninhabited architecture, Maguire’s process begins with enlarging selected sections of photographs taken or collected during these times. Pieced together with squares of blue masking tape, this process is repeated several times, resulting in different formal arrangements to develop new series of collages that evoke a sense of memory and place. Photocopying, cutting, and sticking back together is part of the physical process of further abstracting the original or existing environment that the viewer is then free to piece together or re-interpret as a new space. As with fragmented memories, these new compositional spaces provide reference materials for paintings on boards that are often unconventional in shape and format. In this way, the practice of painting itself begins to crossover into sculpture