Diversions—Games we play
There is something drastic about looking at the past year's collection of works on paper, deciding to take the scissors to them and cutting them up. Something brave and positive, something blackly humorous. Diversions-Games We Play is an exhibition of collages assembled from a year's worth of work (mainly sketches from life-drawing classes) and from found objects from games-jigsaws, scrabble, crosswords, playing cards, chess, lotto tickets and so on. Maggie Thompson has 'recycled' her life-drawings and, breaking out of the fine art paradigm, has re-situated them into social environments of roles and rules.
This is, in a sense, a critique of the life-drawing class and the role of 'the model' which isolates and aestheticises the human figure and is complicit in creating the centralised anthropocentric discourses of Western Culture. Thompson has cut out the figures from her drawing studies and con textualised them, with humour, in broader social situations. In so doing she repudiates traditional notions of the study, the preliminary sketch and the final composition. Process and product are not separated.
The popular analogues Thompson uses to symbolise the social environment are games. In overlaying the figures with the abstracted grids of letters, boards and playing cards, light hearted allusions are made to notions of chance and adaptation, supported by the use of puns, alliteration, anagrams and double meanings in the works and their titles. Thompson has also cut strips of 'background' from her works and these are overlaid in intersecting lines across the compositions. They have a strangely dual effect, implying both two-dimensional framing and three-dimensional perspective.
The majority of figures in Thompson's imagery are women and this directly reflects the predominance of female models in her life-drawing