‘Beyond The Mainland’

Tom Hickman, Recent Works 

Exhibition 3-17 December 2021

Artist's Preview Thursday 2 December 6-8pm at Robert Young Antiques 

“It is said that artists must, if nothing else, attempt to depict and relate to the present day and while some are drawn to comment on, or be influenced by, the terrible things that come to pass in our connected world, I in my insular ignorance, stich images of my neighbour’s sheep”.  Qu. Tom Hickman

Tom Hickman lives and works alone in his croft on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He has no mobile phone, television, tablet or wifi. 

He is self-taught and claims that he started taking his art seriously in the mid-1980s, then saying that since he moved to the Hebrides in 2005 his work “has become heavily influenced by wool, from the sheep on the croft to the myriad of coloured yarn used in the fabrication of Harris Tweed” and recently wrote “Naïve, primitive, amateur, provincial, self-taught, non-academic; stylistically there is no one term that satisfactorily describes my stictching”. 

The works are a created with a unique blend of fabric collage backgrounds, invariably fashioned from scrap pieces of locally woven Harris Tweed, on which he then embroiders naïve landscape and figurative details. These works are immediately compelling, the bold images emerging from a riot of textures and colours excecuted in a variety of stitching techniques. 

We will be showing a significant body of his recent work, which is a very exciting departure for us and a significant step for our Contemporary Collaborations initiative. 

It is somehow counter intuitive to describe a 68 year old self-taught “stitcher” as an emerging artist, but we believe that this is contemporary work of great integrity and we are both excited and proud to present Tom Hickman’s first one man show in London.

 “Ever since my childhood I seem to have found or created my own path and walked alone” 

Please click here to view the "Beyond the Mainland" Catalogue