JEREMY THOMAS
For the past twenty years, Jeremy's practice has involved inflating steel objects with a relationship to colors used in commercial industry. In that time, his understanding of this process and why he does it has evolved from purely a practice as a metal sculptor and blacksmith to the exploration of atmosphere and air itself. Our atmosphere is ever-present, something we experience yet rarely take notice of, yet is so vital to our very existence. Due to our involuntary interaction with air, it seems intangible, as we rarely take notice of our constant interaction with it. The act of respiration or breathing is the continuous chemical reaction that sustains our life. Air connects us physically to one another and all other respirating beings. Through each breath taken, our interpersonal balance, as well as the atmosphere around each of us, is affected. What one exhales, another inhales, in an intimate exchange between each other, coexistent and dependent upon the other.
Atmosphere is measured and experienced through pressure and volume. This sets up a climate or prevailing set of conditions. This work is the visual experience of those conditions as applied to a geometric construct. These constructs act as set structural perimeters that are contingent and only true to themselves, not a reflection of or reference to anything else. These objects are grown more than fabricated. Each work is specific to the dialogue between material and the condition set up by the construct during each moment of inflation, creating a record of the object’s physical history—the dialogue between materials, as shown with each crease, fold, mark, dimple, and curve.
Color memory affects our experience of each color. When you read “banana,” you think yellow due to your experience of bananas. Each interaction with color affects the chemical structures in our brain, affecting mood or reconnecting us to memory. In this way, industries use colors to manipulate what we buy and how we feel. Within our modern society, we are continuously bombarded with color, in marketing and imagery, to affect our perceptions and arouse our emotions. When these colors are removed from these known contexts and re-appropriated into a neutral space, we are afforded the opportunity to experience them viscerally again, outside of the pretexts and our attachment to color memory. This allows for a new experience or reflection on past experience within the color context.
Neurotransmitter Series
This series is based on interpretations of chemical structures from neurotransmitters: serotonin, norepinephrine, GABA, dopamine, and glutamate. Each piece interacts with the next, forming a whole that describes a larger, shifting balance of chemical interactions in the brain. They play a role in how we interpret experience and affect our mood, emotions, and behaviors. Every phenomenon we experience affects the chemical makeup in our mind and body.
Neurotransmitters are essential to the function of our neural systems. The idea was to make sculptures that, through the act of viewing, would create a similar physical structure in the viewer's mind. Not as a conceptual formation of that experience, but as a physiological experience that is not cognitive. By using the chemical structures of these neurotransmitter molecules as the construct for the inflated sculptural shape, and color as a visceral stimulant, the viewer, in theory, would both be looking at and physically making the same chemical, creating a mental/chemical feedback loop through the phenomenon of creating the sculpture as a mental object.
