Margot Voorhies Thompson
With this exhibition entitled The Theater of Language: Conversations and Metaphors, Margot Voorhies Thompson has made complex and intricate works on paper. The imagery ranges from toppling urbanscapes overlaid with cascading letterforms to studies of plant structures that suggest a kind of organic architecture. Thompson has been thinking about the complex systems that form the basis of both human experience and the natural world. In keeping with past work, the ideas informing this show reflect on how shifting systems in both nature and human society often lead to life reasserting itself in new and unexpected ways. Thompson utilizes her longstanding formal and abstract visual language of calligraphed shapes and intersecting forms to reflect on the delicate balances in the world that seem so often to be in flux in the 21st century.
A Portland native, Margot Voorhies Thompson studied at Lewis and Clark College, Reed College, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and at the Hochschule Fur Kunsterlische in Linz, Austria. Her work is in collections including the Portland Art Museum, the Stanford University Hospital, and the Printmaking Workshop in New York. Margot Thompson has completed several collaborative book commissions with Kim Stafford, Pattian Rogers, and Wendell Berry for the University of Oregon’s Knight Library Press. Other commissions include pieces for Oregon University of Health and Sciences, Portland; Portland State University; Kaiser Permanente, Tualatin, OR; the Woodstock Branch Multnomah County Library; and Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, both in Portland. Recently she completed a commission for the Oregon State Hospital in Salem.