Treewilder

Treewilder is an exhibition of site responsive interventions, sculptures and video work set in Barnwell Country park aiming to encourage visitors to explore the woodland space throughout autumn and winter aspart of the two year Xylophobia season

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

School of change

A solo show at Matt's Gallery May-June 2012 incorporating Experimental Narrative film, Installation, sculpture, sound, prints and drawings. commissioned by Matt's Gallery 'School of Change' is a project that collides genres and ideas; at its core is a 40 minute sci-fi musical + experimental narrative film, to be shot in my old secondary school which will be transformed into a skewed and satirical version of everyday reality. The project will go on to be realised as an ambitious sculptural and Film Installation at Matt’s Gallery in May - June 2012. I am also planning to take elements of this project ‘on the road’ as a live evening event, that will explore the hybrid, cross-over space between art, music, storytelling and performance. Planned venues: OUTPOST gallery Norwich in summer 2012 and Camden Arts Centre, and other venues outside of London

Double Dummy

This single-screen experimental video work engages with issues of contemporary experimental video art forms and raises questions around languages of representation, and the meanings they carry. Occupying a very particular field that simultaneously deploys both experimental and narrative forms, this methodology produces original results, in that within one piece of work, Thomas creates highly unusual juxtapositions of art forms and filmic /TV genres, through which she raises a number of questions about conventions of representing truth and meaning, using the moving image. ‘Double Dummy’ investigates ideas of difference, mirroring and subjectivity, through various visual analogies that suggest both a psychological, cultural and philosophical reading. By using a combination of split-screen technology, image decay, the narrative motif of a woman, an almost identical stuffed dummy and a band of colour that evokes a painterly sense of the sublime, the traditional conceits of filmic space and what it can represent are questioned. Punctuated by an absurd love story between a ball of hair and a site-specific sculpture, in a (subtitled) dialogue of words across another split screen, the comparison between these visually similar (but culturally very dissimilar) materials and forms, underlines Thomas' enquiry into the power of genre and status to evoke an impression of meaning. ‘Double Dummy’ has been exhibited at major international experimental film venues including screenings at MOMA, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Feminale Cologne; and the ICA London. It was invited to be part of the European Media Arts Festival ‘Global Visions' initiative, showing at fourteen venues across Germany, France, Italy and north America, and by the 'Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin' festival for their PULSAR touring project, sponsored by the Goethe Institute, The British Council, and The Alliance Française. In 2005 it was requested by Video Data Bank for inclusion in their international distribution catalogue

Not Yet Out of the Wood

Not Yet Out of the Wood is a short film by Jennet Thomas featuring a fractured narrative voiced by anthropomorphic bats who inhabit a miniature dream-like stage-set of moss and twigs harvested from her local London cemetery during the first lockdown. Thomas’s film highlights our irrational fears about bats, and draws attention to the greater threat that we pose towards them as a species “they’ve been around for 50 million years. They don’t want anything to do with us, and this whole thing is not their fault.” The film is an off-beat paean to these creatures that culminates in a re-worked version of David Bowie’s song ‘Oh you pretty things’. Commissioned by the New Forest arts organisation 'More Than Ponies' for the series 'TELE VISTAS' July - Nov 2020 A programme of events, community broadcasts and commissioned art works addressing the lure of landscape during the covid crisis and lockdown. Inspired by the local history of William Gilpin, the writer of the picturesque, who was based in the New Forest

The Man Who Went Outside

This 10 minute video questions our commonplace acceptance of the rhetorical codes of the ‘authority voice’ as used in factual film narration, and the ‘reliability of the author’ [in this case ‘director’] in relation to the truth of what we are being shown, and the style in which we expect to see it. A man (performed in improvisation by Richard Layzell) takes on the ticks and gestures of a tv ‘presenter’ against a green- screen of shifting colour. Footage of his physical puppet-like performance is punctuated by images that sometimes reliably represent, and sometimes contradict an oddly distorted voice – over, that instructs us about how to interpret what we are seeing. Using found images from the internet, this work deploys humour and repulsion to experientially explore issues of our understanding of truth and meaning in relation to context, and taste, and questions expectations of the veracity of certain representational tropes

The Unspeakable Freedom Device (Film/Installation)

The Unspeakable Freedom Device is a project commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery comprising narrative film and installation that investigates new ways that art can question our perception of contemporary social reality using speculative fiction. This project explores the idea of the image of Margaret Thatcher as an after-burn on the collective memory of our culture, using the Winter Gardens, Blackpool as a key location- a Victorian palace of fantasy-entertainment and the site of political rhetoric that has shaped society. It proposes a future-primitive world in which the difference between technology and magic is incomprehensible, and a cargo-cult of Thatcher has arisen

The advice shape

A solo show commissioned for and by 'Outpost Gallery' in Norwich. This is a two- screen video installation with sculptural elements. The Advice Shape is an immersive double screen video installation projected in a darkened chamber Thomas has constructed within the existing gallery walls. An arrow directs the audience into the installation through black and white slit curtains familiar to nightclubs, strip joints and festivals. Inside the chamber the curtains line two ends of the space and are freighted with a sense of anticipation. At each end domestic projector screens face each other. On the farthest an uncanny doubling of the slit curtains sways gently in a breeze, alternating with an androgynous nurse wearing a rubber head. This queer presence has an obscure intelligence about it and gestures at the audience as if undertaking some kind of aptitude test to no apparent ends. On the facing screen is a hybrid semi-narrative of sensationalist still and moving images, audio, blocks of colour, spoken word, performance and text. Appropriated imagery of natural disasters, mutated animals, abject beauty, American genocide and stuffed effigies coexist with chirrupy 1950s advertising music or romantic classical. The soundtrack manipulates your judgment through a rollercoaster of affective registers

I AM YOUR ERROR MESSAGE

A multimedia live performance that has been realized six times at different venues across the UK and the USA. It also exists in gallery installation format, which has been continuously exhibited. It consists of a video projection alongside a costumed performer interacting physically and engaging in dialogue with the on-screen voices and images and sculptural installation materials. In this work experimental speculative fiction writing is combined with experimental video and sound. It explores alternative ways to articulate the condition of contemporary subjectivity in which software, and machine generated algorithms influence the way we think about value. It uses cryptic parody and develops new techniques of visual as well as verbal critique to illuminate ways in which ideology is hidden within architecture of our everyday interface with computers - particularly in the act of buying, and the search for ‘wellness’. Please see http://vimeo.com/73611078 for a documentation of one performance of the work

Animal Condensed<Animal Expanded #2

Video installation with sculptural and design elements. This work also functions as a stand-alone single screen video work. This work is the second of a loosely-connected trilogy of short video/installations exploring troubling relationships between humans, animals and Artificial Intelligence. Two characters speak urgently to camera about their relationship with an intelligent substance they call ‘Animal Expanded’. A picture builds of accelerated future where ‘real’ animals may no longer exist - their spirits abstracted into a something that may cause humans to loose control to an artificially intelligent world