Deborah Thompson - Pan-dulum: a Call to Unreason

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Deborah Thompson, "Pan-dulum," 2019

Pan-dulum: a call to unreason is the outcome of Deborah Thompson’s ongoing research into the poles of instinct between hope and fear. These manifest as extremes of anxiety that volley between panic and rapture. Her response to these conditions is an invocation to the pagan god of nature, Pan.

This exhibition questions our impulse to please a system that does not serve us and refuses our individuality. If our instincts of caring, nourishing and relation building are absent from the dominant discourse, then everyone suffers. Pan-dulum manifests the swing from extremes of our instinctual wisdom from the throngs of high stress and over achieving to forms of escapism and transcendence. Pan’s presence is a desperate call for something different: a wisdom born of unreason in a culture driven by reason.

Thompson’s paintings and sculpture court the chaos that rides at the fringes of the mind and society. Drawing on philosophical writings and pondering the nature of mental health, these works engage a disturbance of order that can become the seedbed of a new source of wisdom, born from unreason. It is a call for connection to our instincts – it is urgent that we bring the wisdom of nature to consciousness!