​

Statement

​

My practice explores the narrative potential of painting, drawing on cinema, personal experience and everyday observation. I am interested in how people, places, objects and encounters can hold emotional and psychological significance, and how their meaning can shift through reflection and nostalgia.

​

Drawing from personal photographs, lived experience and images collected from everyday life, I make paintings that sit somewhere between observation and memory. Rather than illustrating a complete story, I am interested in the moment before or after something has happened; the details that remain, the things left unsaid, and the possibility of a story beyond the image.

​

Working in series allows me to return to particular experiences and subjects from different perspectives. In Observations, I find significance in the everyday. InThe End, I observe the remnants of lives lived in a series based on house clearances.  In Love, I consider the traces that relationships leave behind; reminders, exchanges and reflections of family and past relationships. These are personal encounters, but also familiar ones; objects and images that carry a wider cultural understanding of place and belonging.

​

Horror cinema has been an important influence on the way I construct paintings. I am drawn to its visual language: suspense, absence, isolation and the unresolved. For my residency at The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum in Cheltenham, I paid homage to horror movies in my own constructed narrative for the series titled The Cheltenham Sweep.

​

Across my work, I am interested in the space between the familiar and the uncanny, and in how memory, desire and experience can transform seemingly ordinary moments into something more ambiguous and evocative.

​

Born in Cheltenham, 1987

Lives/ works in London

​

Education

​

Wimbledon College of Art, London

BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting

2006-2009

University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham

BTEC Foundation Diploma

2005-2006

​

​

Social Media

​

Zack Thorne (@zackthorne) • Instagram photos and videos

​