Cindy Thomas is an emerging artist from the Dallas/Ft.Worth Texas area working predominantly in video installation/mixed media where she explores our physical and spiritual relationships with nature.  Her materials of choice are driven by her concepts often leading to use of raw earthly materials within ephemeral environments.  Artists who have influenced her include: Ann Hamilton, Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg.

 

She has an undergraduate degree in Art and English from Texas Tech University and 48 hours towards a graduate degree in art from Texas Women’s University. Many of these graduate hours took place at the Texas Tech Junction Campus under the guidance of former T.T.U. sculpture professor Sara Waters.  Although she started out as a drawing/painting major, her father’s courageous battle with emphysema led her into the world of sculpture and video installation. As she began documenting and using objects from her father’s journey with this disease in 2001, she also began documenting stories of Americans who lived through the ‘Dust Bowl Years’ of The Great Plains during the 1930’s through traveling to the heart of America’s Dust Bowl. These generous people donated their time to be interviewed as well as share objects, letters and photographs that she has frequently used in her art.  This research led to discovering parallel situations that occurred at the same time in Australia and Africa showing universal themes of man’s interruption to the balance of nature which we continue to see today all over the world. Therefore, a dichotomy of two stories continue to emerge from her work: a personal story of her father and her own struggle to truly ‘breathe in life’ as well as a universal story of mankind’s struggle with allowing the earth to breathe as the Creator intended.