Play: Expanding the Practice

Those who know me well would describe me as playful, yet this side of me has rarely found space in my work. Enrolling in the Master in Photography at ECAL, I knew I wanted to push my practice further - to break away from the constraints of continuity, from the self-imposed expectation that my work must always fit within a specific framework.

I wanted to make space for something completely different. And so, when the opportunity arose, I chose to explore this playful side of my identity. This led to Life Admin: Struggles in Self-Care, developed under the guidance of Charles Negre at ECAL. Given the brief of creating characters within still-life photography, I looked inward - towards myself and my surroundings. The result was work that felt personal yet lighthearted and that reminded me of the joy of just making without questioning too much.

Life Admin: Struggles in Self-Care

This series turns the banal world of household chores into one of absurdity. Sponges stand like towering green monoliths, and cigarettes grow like brittle branches in a pot of ash, a fragile ode to both growth and decay. These objects, often unseen in their familiarity, are presented with a playful yet disquieting vitality - cast as performers in the tragicomic drama of neglect.

Through surrealist humor, the series reflects on the routines we abandon and the care we fail to sustain, rendering the mundane monumental. The work transforms chore into choreography, reanimating these forgotten items to question the line between maintenance and madness. What happens when life’s smallest rituals are deferred, their objects left to gestate into something both grotesque and alive? The result is a meditation on the absurdity of care and the surreal beauty lurking in its absence.

Thomas Martin was part of Face-to-Face: Arles Edition 2024.

Check out his Artist Feature Somewhere Less Than Heaven.