Thomas Pearson

Sylf-Lore is first an assembling of painting and glass artwork. This body of work explores the construction of a personal mythology, where memories, objects, and stories of domestic parenthood coalesce with broader inherited mythologies. Domestic representations of environments, my children, family relationships, objects, and everyday materials sit alongside references from religious, classical, and mythological traditions, unified by a responsiveness to class and material culture. 

My practice moves between hand-blown glass, painting, and drawing, returning repeatedly to the human figure and the potential of functional objects to reveal personal and shared meaning. The hourglass remains a central motif within my practice: a vessel of time, mortality, and reflection rendered into technically challenging sculptural and figurative forms. However, Sylf-Lore expands this material dialogue, where the hourglass operates as a functional symbol of identity. The hourglass is used to describe a continual movement in which the peripheral fragments of experience, memory, and collective existence are drawn inward by the central organising force, before inevitably dispersing once again. This form explains identity dialectically, as both tightly singular and endlessly plural.

Sylf-Lore refers to the development of a personal mythology: a private language or lore created through making. The work is autotelic, created first as a way of self-comprehension before becoming an offering to others. I suggest that making begins inwardly, but meaning inevitably expands outward. From the self to those we are with, and eventually to those we may never meet.

Artist Biography

Thomas Pearson

Thomas Pearson is a Canberra-based glass artist whose practice explores the relationship between material, memory, identity, and human experience. Working across hand-blown glass, painting, and drawing, Pearson’s work combines traditional glassmaking processes with figurative and symbolic imagery. His sculptural practice centres on the hourglass (clepsammia) eternally revisiting themes of time, mortality, transformation, and the psychological structures through which people understand themselves. Pearson’s glass practice was developed through his time in the Glass Studio at JamFactory, South Australia, and through international residencies in Murano, Italy, and Belgium. His work has been developed and exhibited nationally and internationally, including finalist selections in the Venice Glass Biennale, Fuse Glass Prize, and National Emerging Art Glass Prize. Alongside his artistic practice, Pearson has published psychology research exploring grief, identity, and experiences of fatherhood in the context of perinatal death. This intersection between psychology and art informs his ongoing interest in memory, personal mythology, and the symbolic worlds people universally depend upon to navigate their world.