One of the founding figures of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno once said, "The scars on your body will scab over and heal in time. As for the scars on your mind, if you accept and endure them, the experiences will bring you both pleasure and sorrow."
Psicosi is a new work that seeks to develop upon previous investigations by the artist Thomas John Bacon that question the conception of 'being' and the multiplicity of existence: "I've lost a part of myself somewhere and I cannot find it. When one has gone into one's self so far, what will bring you back?" Psicosi is not a journey - it is a state. Figures drift past you everyday - we are surrounded at times and yet constantly alone. In the company of the self - what does one have left when that starts to erode?
The erosion of the self was a theme recently explored by the artist in its relationship to Human Rights and the intimate effect that one individual may have upon another. Psicosi builds upon this in a far more personal manner in an attempt to discover the muted 'self,' thus becoming an intimate journey into the artist's own self destruction and depression.
"Two sides to my self, you make me betray myself."
Putting his body at the centre of his work, Thomas uses a minimalistic structure, Butoh based based methods of movement & focus, and a respect for the symbiosis between body and space to explore these themes. The piece that physically pushes the body to go beyond the norm either via the spectacle of visceral torture or in a more unlikely mundane sense is amazing; pushing the concept of ‘being’ via studies of minutiae to extreme points of purgatory in a durational performance or via an intense short piece of performance art, is at the heart of his current body of work and for Thomas, he feels that it facilitates his questions between the existence of self and its relationship to environment through this detailed examination of being.
