Born British, expatriated to the Caribbean at 20, Thompson received formal art training at Portsmouth Grammar School, where draughtsman ship and life classes dominated. Then, during a foundation year at Art College began experimentation with paper maché and 3D form. Artists Anselm Kiefer, Enzo Cucchi, Julian Schnabel and Lucien Freud influenced her oil painting at the time.
On her first visit to Grenada in ‘89 the greys and browns of Turneresque English seascapes gave way to Caribbean sunsets and a discovery of a whole new bold palette, vivid with pure colour.
Her early landscape works are interested in stretching (whilst still respecting) the classical canvas format into the third dimension through paper maché relief and incorporating actual physical debris from the scene, therefore commenting on the illusory nature of figurative art and the physical reality connecting man and nature.
Later, she began to express more personal reflections, believing the human form still to be the most provocative motif, here an underlying thematic thread, whether flat oil or relief works, is the ambiguous reactions to female sensuality. Then there is the personification of her adoptive home, Grenada, through static figures as sculpture in an almost overpoweringly ripe and verdant tropical landscape.
Of late, she is exploring neo-romantic ideas of nature creating a context for one’s existence. In an age of ever increasing virtual rather than physical exploration of our surroundings, there is a modern alienation of sense of self. Reconnection with our natural surroundings; cultivation of earth, nurturing and growth also reconnects ones physical and emotional self. This is demonstrated by hand-crafted sculpture and collage preceding the illusory realism of the painted form and is meant as an antithesis to electronically mass reproduced art forms.