Mia Thom – An In/visible Record

How to imagine floating: 

In the silence which is full

                    To witness.

Left in matter, thought, and senses: touch and taste and sound. 

                           Linger in 

and beyond dreaming.

In An In/visible Record, Mia Thom extends her work across varied material, topics and modalities. As an interdisciplinary artist, Thom is invested in both audio-visual and psychological exploration—engaging their meeting-points and querying their constructs. With an expansive practice, she remains specific in attention. Since 2017, and perhaps intrinsically before, Thom has explored sound, space and light. While establishing her artistic practice, she returned to academia to study psychology. In studying the mind – in science and feeling – her artistic practice expanded. With An Invisible Record, Thom engages relationships between photography, drawing, and sound, to conjure time spans that are subliminally witnessed. 

My body is sound

Listening guides my body

Sound is the fiber of my being 

Pauline Oliveros, The Earthworm Also Sings: A Composer’s Guide to Deep Listening

The title An In/visible Record is a visual and auditory puzzle. The word ‘record’ is used counter-intuitively. It is not used in the sense of ‘fixing’ or ‘defining’ something to be replicated/reproduced. Instead, ‘record’ is chosen to invoke a sensation connected to memory. Memories are fallible, inevitably modifiable through recurring reconstruction, and always at risk of becoming lost. The title riffs off musical associations of an object carrying sound. And further, phonetically, to a musical ‘chord’. Considering the social, institutionalised and private body, Thom explores visible and ‘invisible’ manifestations thereof. Comprising sonic mediation, a set of drawings, photographic light reactions and decay in slow motion, a suspended installation—the exhibition sweeps across (in)visible materials of record, each materialise residue which is all at once reactive, active, passive and slow.