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Thomas John Bacon
PYSCHOGENESIS SERIES

first performed on March 31, 2017
Sidney Nolan Trust, Powys, Wales
Ongoing

THOMAS JOHN BACON

United Kingdom

thomasjohnbacon.com

PYSCHOGENESIS SERIES
THOMAS JOHN BACON

As an artist who works intrinsically through the practice of phenomenology, my methodology engages with embodied and disembodied phenomenological experiences.

In early 2017, I was commissioned for a research and development residency with the Sidney Nolan Trust. Here I was afforded the opportunity to be present in a landscape that allowed me to mindfully engage with both a presence and an absence.

A key moment in my artist diaries during this time was when I began to accept that the environment was intervening in me rather than I in it. These avulsions resonated with the physical fractures I had experienced through injuries in my life, such as the one I obtained from a motorcycle accident. But then, they become more significantly symbolic of the fault lines in my own psychogenesis and my recent mental health.

This lent itself directly to what I began to describe as a black-cross period of work. A healing symbol in its familiar red form in the West, it is appropriated in a new guise towards tracing patterns of psychogenesis, healing, and a cycle of self destruction.

In 2017, I began to revisit artifacts from old performances, while making new actions that could traverse my own pathways through both lands, intervening with my own reciprocal intersubjective or intercorporeal experiences. Tracing fault lines and fissures vital to understanding my own avulsions between Self/s. I would find myself containing, binding, or wrapping not only my limbs and body but also parts of me caught in documentation or detritus from archived performances, as well as the world that intervened in my lifeā€”tree stumps, rocks, and (impossibly) streams.