It’s A Guy Thing: Clare Thomas

It’s a Guy Thing is a series of paintings and embroideries about domesticity and female identity. The series came out of Thomas’s lifelong love of pattern and an interest in the historical use of homilies and religious platitudes in women’s domestic embroidery. Both paintings and embroideries are round, the shape of an embroidery hoop, and combine pattern – already present on the fabric, and painted on the canvas by Thomas - with phrases: from the unexpected pearls of wisdom of strangers to street graffiti and even house names.

The result is a profound yet playful way to integrate Thomas’s personal experience with her historical and gender inheritance.