Short Poem (Threadbare)
Charlie Godet Thomas
Charlie Godet Thomas is a British-Bermudian artist whose work employs a wide range of approaches including writing, painting, sculpture, assemblage, photography, sound and video. His work is concerned with the connections between visual art and literature, the act of writing, the autobiographical, the tragic and the humorous. In the spirit of found poetry his work is summoned from unlikely places such as bookbinding processes, street signage, funereal foam lettering and pharmaceutical packaging.
The work submitted for the 2020 Bermuda Biennial was made in Mexico City where the artist currently resides. In these works, Thomas highlights overlooked aspects of the city, summoning poetic moments through seemingly simple interventions. Thomas has a tendency towards working with transient, overlooked and abandoned materials in his practice, in this instance, small posters. Short Poem (Threadbare) is a woodcut print which mirrors the form of small home-made posters, in Thomas’ version he inverts the function (and tone) of the poster. Where there would usually be a barrage of information, there is instead a void humorously bringing the black square out of art history and into the public realm.