About Me

Bio

Gareth Thomas is a poet and visual artist living in the mountains of the great connecting range. He writes mostly about environmental and social justice and identifies with a community of artists who reject the industrial/modernist identity of artistic genius to move towards an ecological paradigm of arts practice. His work is published online via www.earthpoesis.wordpress.com and Overland. His work has also been shortlisted twice in the Judith Wright emerging poets prize.

As a visual artist Gareth works with natural found pigments that he grinds up in his domestic/wild studio spaces. The pigments are taken directly from places he has connection with and he believes that it has made his art making a spiritual practice. It has also made his art making a political act.

As a poet Gareth works to express a grounded experience of place. The nature of the poetry is simple observations of the world. The language is everyday and earthy. It is not abstract or philosophical. It is in the simple everyday observations that meaning is found, mostly in the unspoken associations that the imagery carries within itself. The world carries its own creativity where juxtapositions of random encounter tell a holistic story. Gareth feels that his work as a poet is to communicate, in simple poetic language, the experience of the world story in my place of belonging. The place tells its own story.