Gravity: New Works by HM Thompson

Gravity: New Works by HM Thompson

View the Exhibition: August 25- October 16, 2025

SYKES GALLERY ι BREIDENSTINE HALL - 1st Floor

Exhibition | August 25 - October 16, 2025

Reception | September 8, 2025

Time | 5:30 - 7:00pm

Artist Talk | 6:00pm

Gallery Hours ι  Standard business hours for Sykes Gallery are Monday - Friday from 8:00am-4:00pm. 

About the Exhibition

Material and process anchor the work, which began during a politically and personally fraught time.
What began as a forced exercise shifted from heaviness into playfulness, itself a kind of small, radical
act. At its simplest, the work is an exploration of form, texture, and structure filtered through a
candy-coated, queer / trans sensibility.

Colored clay slabs are rolled by hand, cut with a CNC router, and warped through extreme heat in an
embrace of failure and chance. Ceramic forms often pair with plywood, metal, resin, or found objects,
navigating tensions between old and new technologies, handmade and digital, natural and artifice,
self-built and system-imposed. These sculptures exist as heavily manipulated structures that freeze a
moment of pyroplasticity in time, evoking the external forces acted upon them.

Artifice is central to this body of work, as are color, texture, and material. Some pieces seem to defy
gravity, underscoring the unstable interplay between expectation and collapse. Layered assemblage
and miniaturized installations reveal fracturedness, delicacy, and patchwork arrangements that translate into bodily and phenomenological encounters.

Language, codification, and meaning layer throughout the work. Idioms, visual puns, and the concept of gravity allow for multiple and layered meanings, producing moments where humor, tension, and
transformation overlap, all while hinting at the weight of the systems that shape daily life.

 

About the ARTIST

HM Thompson is a queer and trans artist from Louisville, Kentucky, primarily working in ceramics and
installation, with a background in graphic design and photography. Thompson earned a BFA from
Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and an MFA in Ceramics from Indiana
University in Bloomington, Indiana.

Much of their work examines social constructions of gender through the lens of adolescence,
employing candy, color, and artifice as forms of subversive sweetness. Using ceramics, mixed media,
and found materials, their work engages with tensions between handmade and digital processes,
material transformation, and layered meanings.

Thompson has exhibited nationally and teaches middle school photography, sculpture, and ceramics in
Baltimore, MD. Thompson lives with their partner, Marissa, their husky, Mr. Roy, and a rotating cast of
senior foster dogs.