ART
Ariadna Thompson Interview
Ariadna Thompson
Artist
I grew up in Sea Gate, Brooklyn which was very close to Coney Island. My mother was an Ab Ex painter, and my father was a photographer, so the conversations about art were ongoing, and prolific. I spent a great deal of time in Coney Island with my friends, which was an amusement park area in steep decline. This experience had a salutary and long-lasting effect on my aesthetic leanings. The vivid colors, and the decay of Coney Island created an entry point for me in reflecting the dark side of childhood. I have tried in vain, to escape this past, but it has been impossible to ignore. So now, I embrace it with a newfound acceptance of strange remorse and alacrity.
Where do you get your inspiration from?

My inspiration is without a doubt Coney Island; it appealed to my sense of the bizarre and the vibrancy and oversaturated colors that are found in amusement parks. I will never forget the ride, the Magic Carpet; a very derelict experience, that involved crawling around in dark nasty spaces, that ended with a peculiar ride on a mechanical magic carpet.
What other artists have been inspirational to you in your work?

Artists that respond to their environment and produce work that invades space in a monumental manner are very instructive to me. Cornelia Parker, Judy Pfaff, and Michelle Segre are artists that are somewhere between painting and sculpture but achieve great success in articulating their intelligent missives.
What can you tell us your work is about and a bit about your creative process?

For me, there is solace in the geometry of fundamentals, and in a practice that focuses on the ephemeral nature of paper and the ease of its transportability, which allows me to create large scale constructions. Working in components, I can build very large installations that are multilayered, and can significantly project outwards. Frequently, I will weave in mathematical systems like Pi and the Golden Section in a hexadecimal format. but I attempt to partly obscure the written content, by painting and slicing into the letters, integrating them into the overall structure of the piece. These paper constructions combine digitally printed, hand and laser cut geometric shapes that are painted, sprayed, scraped and gouged. Incorporated into these paper, polystyrene and Mylar sections are glitter, paint, modeling paste, gold leaf, printed commercial matter and recycled paper pulp forms.