“What, then, does Subject Matters ask us to see? Perhaps it asks us to attend to what happens when a human being gives up some measure of conscious control and allows hand, material, time and environment to participate in the making of an image. In that encounter, something emerges that is neither wholly planned nor wholly accidental. It is a trace of a person at a particular moment: thought, feeling, body and material brought into relation. And perhaps that is why these apparently abstract works can feel so strangely intimate. They do not tell us what to think. They give us something to experience.” —Alistair Fox.

“There is no drawing “of” anything here. What accumulates is a record of duration: not a picture, but the residue of how long a hand kept moving in more or less the same way. Colour, density and rhythm shift from sheet to sheet, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly. A drawing built from observation asks to be read outward, toward its referent, (what does this represent, how faithfully, from what vantage, etc). A drawing built from repetition asks to be read inward, toward the process that produced it.” —Wesley John Fourie.

“In my now-yearly trips to witness Thomson-Bache at work, he broke his trance to give me another ambiguous moment between madness and magic. He murmured to me, “You know computers? They just want to predict and reproduce. They can’t tap into this kind of thing”. AI does have fractal formulas and image generation, but it doesn’t have a human body. Thomson-Bache’s body acts as a conduit, generating images in collaboration with the physical world and in turn making a record of that world. While the Surrealists may have used automation to show the latent humanness of the unconscious, Thomson-Bache uses automation to show that human genius isn’t in abstraction or planning. Our genius is in our capacity to fuse with the immediate physical world.” —Tristan Keillor.

Quotations from James Thomson-Bache: Subject Matters, in the issue of the RDS Gallery Occasional Essays Series published in conjunction with Subject Matters.