Sue Tompkins

Spanning work made over the last twenty years, Wanna surveys Tompkins' exploration of language as a form of potential: shifting, compressing, layering, modulating. Across performance, painting, typewritten pages, and fabric works, Tompkins ecstatically pushes the boundaries of her mediums, wherein the flexibility of the performative word leads to material transformation.

The physicality of Tompkins’ performance practice, in which she moves inwards and outwards towards the audience and around the space, is felt in the active gestures in her paintings, whose glistening acrylic surfaces reveal saturated colors, dashed brushwork erupting into vowels, and even occasional stabs that tear into the canvas. Each carries a titular word, often monosyllabic and rendered in Tompkins’s distinct capitalized lettering, that blurts out to the viewer. Her typewriter works contrast concrete approaches to the written form with alliterative phrases, whose elusive but hopeful messages are heightened as they spread in stuttering formations across the page. Tompkins’s chiffon works flutter subtly when bodies shift in space, reinforcing her curiosity in the dialogue between movement and materiality.

Tompkins’ performances began in the 1990s following her graduation from The Glasgow School of Art, and through the formation of the collective Elizabeth Go with her twin sister Haley Tompkins, as well as Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Tripp, and Victoria Morton in 1997. In 1999, she joined the Scottish indie rock band Life Without Buildings (active from 1999 through 2002) as their lead singer. Despite only being active for four years, the groundbreaking band amassed a cult following.

Sue Tompkins (b. 1971, Leighton Buzzard, UK) lives and works in Glasgow. Tompkins graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1994, and has been involved in exhibitions and performances worldwide including solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute (Glasgow, UK), Kunstraum am Schauplatz (Vienna, AU), Torpedo Theatre, (Amsterdam, NL), Halle für Kunst (Lüneburg, DE), Inverleith House (Edinburgh, UK), Spike Island (Bristol, UK), and Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, MO). She has presented performances and been included in numerous group exhibitions including those at Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, CH), Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN), Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge, UK), the 29th São Paulo Biennale (São Paulo, BR), the British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery, London and touring; MACBA (Barcelona, ES), ICA and the Tate Modern (London, UK); and Artists Space (New York, NY).