Thomas Burns is an artist living and working in Melbourne, Australia, with B.F.A in Drawing & Printmaking from the Victorian College of the Arts.

 

He appropriates imagery of flora, fauna, the human form and the mythological and microbiological from magazines, transforming them in an intersecting synthesis that culminates in the creation of fantastical new beings and environments.

Each new being created represents a personal exploration, their purpose is to emotionally engage the viewer, provoking a visceral response to their alien appearance, while simultaneously being familiar. Each creature is anthropomorphised or personified by the viewers' mental associations with the biological "material" that comprises them.

Rooting his approach to art making in analogue collage, Thomas combines this with an array of techniques including sculpture, printmaking, stickers, and paste-up street art to create atypical three dimensional artworks. Inspired by the interactivity of natural history museum spaces and exhibitions, Thomas creates installations with a diversity of scale and playful positioning, that substitute the passive mode of observation seen in traditional gallery arrangements for environments designed to invite the viewer to explore and interpret his work in a way that provokes curiosity, wonder and excitement.