Wednesday Lecture | Tom | 13th of February

Tom Railton


Tom Railton was born in the city, central of England, Coventry.  However he is currently working in London. He has recently completed the Artquest Research residency at the Foundling Museum and joined the committee for DIY Space for London.

To me personally I translated Railtons work to be very psychologically based. He has worked on many projects most of which he hasn't even shown but he likes the effects they can have. Tom Railton thinks of the why, the deeper things that are going on in your mind but also the long term affects of something especially with the constant use of technology.

One of his works that appealed to me greatly was 'Entryism'. An installation consisting of bricks, steel, glass and mortar.  It comes across quite light hearted as it is reminiscent (to me anyway) of rainbows which is usually associated with a lighter emotion.  However, we see the coloured glass shards and suddenly the work appears more violent causing a delayed response of something maybe a little more darker. Railton himself says "the primary concern was to make a colourful version of something sinister". There is a deeper meaning to this piece and relates to Railtons interest with Norse mythology but also associations with municipal barriers.

Although his inspiration for this piece is interesting I am more in admiration of his execution of his work. The combination of something that appears beautiful but with a closer look contains more aggressive elements consequently causing layered thoughts and emotions is something quite complex and hard to achieve. 

All of Railtons other work did not really interest me and honestly don't remember a lot of the things he spoke about looking back apart from Entryism. That is completely fine though,  can't like them all!

It has inspired me to add more layers into my work physically and contextually and I believe it has really helped my practise as sticking to one meaning and one medium was not helping me to produce work I was proud of and I think you can see at this time of the semester as I gained more confidence and upped my game and started to produce more and more work.  It was a step I needed to take to get to where I want to be.

I just wanted to note, it was very hard to pay attention to this lecture as I did not find the delivery all that exciting. It is hard to pay attention to an artist talk about their work if the artist themselves is not very thrilled to be presenting to an audience their own work.

This has made me very aware of when it comes to me talking about my practise and is something that I will keep in mind when I have to present my work during tutorials but especially at my presentation.