Tom Burrows’ resin pieces are laboriously created through a unique and highly variable process. Burrows’ artistic career has included a myriad of explorations in sculptural materials, ranging from performative, site-specific installation work to two-dimensional pieces. Often with an element of research focused on social issues such as homelessness and housing, he has been a significant part of the arts community of British Columbia since the early 1960s.
The works in this exhibition reflect light, bouncing it between the walls of each hollow form and illuminating the natural tendencies of his materials. Vibrant pigmentation causes each piece to possess a seemingly effulgent presence, each transmitting fields of color and allowing for meditative encounters.
Tom Burrows, Gomer Island, polymer resin, 48 x 48 inches
Says Burrows "It’s difficult to impossible for me to verbally zero in on my work, which is essentially non-narrative. I can attempt to describe the factors that circle it. Possibly it is zero, a circle with an empty center. My role as an artist is to construct a set of parameters within which media such as pigmented polyester or glazed porcelain self-generate image, parameters akin to the climatic conditions that allow ice crystals to form snowflakes. I do try to avoid gesture. Any emotional or narrative content is imposed by the viewer anthropomorphizing the medium. The medium is the message. It glows with an inner luminance, a trace to the Chauvet Cave."
Tom Burrows has a BA in Art History from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, and studied Sculpture at St. Martin’s College, London, UK. He has shown his work internationally, at galleries across North America, and at places like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, France, and Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC. Burrows has been selected to do a number of commissions, and his work is part of collections including that of the Canadian Embassy to Japan in Tokyo, Government of Ontario Art Collection, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC and Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, ON among others.
To learn more about Tom Burrows and to see available work, please visit his page.
