“At heart, I’m a surrealist artist, dwelling with spirits from the past, present, and future. My work is shaped like free-form poetry, impacted by a chorus of voices from numerous ghost-like influencers, without linear guidance or rules.”

Marta Thoma Hall has lived many lives. Her grandmother was a mountain climbing transcendentalist who believed in women rights, the preservation of the natural world and reincarnation. Thoma Hall follows this tradition, continually re-embodying herself to forge a unique path - climbing her own mountains, metamorphosizing through the annihilation of self and rebirth through loss and motherhood. Like a modern Romantic mystic, Thoma Hall channels the ghosts of her many lives through artwork - to reveal a vast inner world of fantasy, sensuality, maternity, sorrow, and humor.

“I have visions that become shaped into form, markings, color, texture, expressed in an array of materials. Materials have spirits that declare humble acknowledgement. I don’t copy nature but seek to describe something invisible about life and being. Ghosts, the wind, water, sexuality, care-taking, and time are my subjects. My body is a vessel, my moments spent watching, listening, moving, holding, learning.”

Thoma Hall was born in Nebraska, physically fragile, and sensitive as a child, she possessed the clairvoyance of heightened perception into the unseen realm of what she describes as spirits. She writes about her childhood experience as learning to co-exist with an assortment of ghosts roaming about in an  old farm house. She felt the presence of not only her parents and five siblings existing with colorful auras, but she imagined spirits inhabiting the walls, kitchen, cubbyholes, basement, playroom, and within the chimney. She explains how she, “captured some of the ghosts in drawings and poems, while others swirled around or escaped out the window.” TH danced to the drums of John Cage, wrote stories and plays. She imagined adventures of queens, magical plants, mobsters, and run-away slaves written in first person. From an early age there was never any doubt that she would have much to say about the world and her work would forever be informed by the lyrical flow of intuition. 

She studied Fine Art at UC Berkeley in the 1970’s at the height of the Vietnam war, when the air was filled with protest, challenging of authority, and the potential for re-imagining a world of new possibilities.  Thoma Hall found herself rebelling against professors who seemed out of touch as the marginalized lives of women and African Americans were being questioned in politics and in the streets. Instead, she was drawn to artists who used surreal compositions to express something deeper. The philosophy of surrealism and its association with new psychology theories naturally appealed to her. Using dreams and intuition to tap the creative potential of the unconscious mind to make a new reality through the intuitive juxtaposition of recognizable elements, held the promise of reimaging the world.  Her drawings were instinctively surreal. Embracing identity with humor and the grotesque, she created images of a reimagined self, as gender fluid, animal hybrids, such as bird/woman, cow/woman, or alligator/woman. Images that made sense as she read writings by Carl Jung and Julia Kristeva describing archetypes, elements of the collective unconscious, and the mystery of the maternal. It was no surprise Thoma Hall was included in her first museum exhibition, Fantasies/Visions, by curator Rolando Castellon at SFMOMA in 1975. 

In 1987 Thoma Hall was invited to participate in Sanitary Fill, now called Norcal Recology, an artist residency at the county land fill. While there she was required to make artwork from recycled items sourced from the garbage dump, which had profound implications for her work. “I was a scavenger, invited to hunt through odd mountains for treasures, looking for objects with interesting shapes and textures that I could transform into art. I once found what looked like an industrial size gynecological probe with a lantern at the end, good for exploring caves…I found the sensory input of this adventure to be more profound than the wonderful objects. The repugnance and attraction of this OZ land are similar to the feelings I have had changing my baby’s diapers. The beauty of infant flesh and love for the baby intermingles with repugnance for the waste. I was reminded of Julia Kristeva’s words about the maternal being the “trustee of that mapping of the self’s clean and proper body …” Acting in maternal ways, the caretakers of the earth deal with what is repugnant, toxic, and disease ridden.”

Free from rules of what a painting should be, Thoma Hall began creating paintings with an assemblage of found objects that created poetic associations. Spoons, mechanical parts, various types of lighting, power chords, a crushed child’s bike and other objects of interest were thoughtfully secured to the canvas before the whole composition was sprayed a monochromatic color. Like a 19th century medium using a personal object to channel the spirit of a dead loved one, Thoma Hall uses these specific found objects to channel maternal spirits.  On these surfaces, she painted small, surreal, vignettes depicting motherly figures as icons in fantastical situations that incorporated the specific assemblage objects adhered to each canvas. At times Thoma Hall painted the items interacting with the figures, other times objects were repainted in life like, trompe l'oeil, an illusion that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined. Though surreal, these delicately rendered scenes create a narrative for the physical items, imbuing these ordinary objects with a mysterious, talismanic quality, as if they were some sort of religious relic. These idiosyncratic works are a function of Thoma Hall’s poetic way of describing the unseen spirit world around us by listening to voices of the collective unconscious to see mystery and beauty in the everyday.  

During her time at Recology, Thoma Hall was tasked to make a free-standing sculptural work to remain as part of the Norcal collection. She created “Earth Tear” an eight-foot-tall sculpture in the shape of a rain drop or tear, made from a massive pile of empty plastic bottles she found sparkling in the sunlight. At the conclusion of the residency, she was still eager to continue the exploration of the sculptural possibilities of repurposed material, particularly bottles, but on a much larger scale. Over the next decade she embarked on a series of large public art projects, winning commissions to install new work across the country. She became a fabricator, learning how to drill and mount glass and steel.  She also became an inventor, discovering her own color formula that would not fade in sunlight, to tint the safety coating necessary for the public display of recycled glass bottles.  

The sheer beauty of Marta Thoma Hall’s large scale public art installations is mesmerizing. Like the rest of her work, they seem to emerge from intuition, to describe something deeper about life and the state of the natural world. Appearing as free-floating stained-glass windows, the elevated or suspended sculptures are made from swirling steel armatures that support a metallic netlike mesh containing hundreds of glass bottles that look like schools of iridescent fish swimming is the sea. With quiet serenity, the bottles shimmer and glow in an ever-evolving rainbow of color as the sun changes throughout the day, creating peaceful spaces of meditation, joy and wonder. 

On further consideration the initial seduction of the material and expressive form gives way to the artists deeper intent – to contemplate human activity in the natural world.  In the end one cannot help but think of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, this massive amount of discarded human rubbish spins and flows into a convergence zone known as a gyre. A term gyring can be applied to MT’s sculpture. Frequently associated with the ocean, or the movement of stars in the universe her sculptures swirl and coil in gyrating motion, as if directed by unseen currents or spirits. 

MT’s sculptures such as, “Double Wave,” “Two Tears,” “Water Drop,” “Gila River,” “Green River,”  reference the motion of water with swelling and peaking waves, flowing currents, and eddies. In “Water Source,” the glass bottles rotate around themselves in a vortex. Trash in the water is well represented by the materials, simultaneously beautiful and repugnant.

In “Cosmos,” the major structure is a coiling, massive gyre which contain several quasi-scientific instruments like those meant to collect meteorological or cosmological data. The lines of the undulating metal support structures turn into directional arrows with pointed tips that resemble predictive markings from barometric charts or invisible current indicators on nautical navigation maps. The metal mesh nets attached to the armature contain an intricate weaving of steel cables that, in an act of “ghost fishing” catch only glass bottles, a stand in for all the detritus of human activity that is literally choking the life from the ocean. TH makes what is a trauma of the sea, palatable and necessary to contemplate.

Some of the sculptures integrate dozens of spoons sourced from community participants. In Halls complex personal lexicon, spoons are a maternal symbol of feeding and caring, but here they have a dual function as a tool of mass consumption that necessitates a global system of resource extraction, production, packaging, dissemination and waste, that inevitably ends up in a landfill or the sea. In the age of manmade climate change, Thoma Hall’s elegant sculptures seem to be predicting and mapping their own demise, trapped in a hurricane of our own making. 

Reinventing herself to explore new territory, in 2015 Thoma Hall became fascinated with 3D printing technology to expand on the surreal experience. Previous sculptural assemblage work explored unexpected poetic combinations of found objects, but this technology had the surreal potential to create a new reality through the seamless combination of recognizable objects in illogical juxtapositions. The idea of using computers to further manipulating the physicality of objects - to morph, meld, invert, stretch, echo, ripple and infinitely replicate - came with the promise of entering the territory of dreams, to give form to the subconscious without the confines of rational rules or the sculptural limits of other physical materials. Learning and experimenting with the form over several years, Thoma Hall sent hundreds of ideas off for printing, tweaking each of the digital files after seeing the results, and printing them again.  At first the pieces were small, able to fit in the palm of a hand.  

As the years went on the shapes grew into free standing fantastical forms – a crouching child with the head of a lion, a unicorn bust with a human hand torso walking upright on fingertips, or a delicate violin with adolescent breasts whose waist morphs into a flowing gown that seamlessly turns into a piece of driftwood.  Other sculptures are abstract mash ups of repeated objects whose forms have been altered, stretched, melted, twisted and merged into one another, resembling a coral reef that grows by infinitely replicating variations of itself. Her studio is now filled with printed sculptures, that sometimes exist on their own, or are in relation to other objects. But the sculptures have not stayed still, they have begun to migrate onto paintings as Thoma Hall has once again begun incorporating sculpture with painting by including the printed objects with new canvases.

As her painting has matured over the years, Thoma Hall has steadily moved toward abstraction. Her paintings are still conceptually surrealist - using the methodology of how dreams are constructed to collide radically incompatible things into a new reality. Her move into emotional abstraction expands this idea, becoming another layer of juxtaposition to stylistically combine expressive mark and realism into something new, which moves the work beyond the tradition of Surrealist painters’ reliance on seamless illusion. For Thoma Hall it now feels less about tricking the eye, and more about connecting the heart. An impeccable draftswoman, she has the ability to render subjects in lifelike detail, but paintings that might have felt tight or controlled in the past, are now unbound - moving as freely as the spirits that guide them.

Moments of realism still burst forth, made all the more surreal as representational fragments float in atmospheric scenes of dreamlike mystery or are partially obscured by bold expressive brushstrokes of vibrant color. Abstraction and figuration, the past and the present, male and female, the real and the imagined comingle in a cacophony of form and material. 

In an era where truth is subjective, institutions have fractured and individuals are required to assimilate vast amounts of competing images and information, Thoma Hall’s juxtapositions vacillate between seamless transition, and abrupt edge, to reveal new worlds and the fractures between old ones. These paintings feel urgent, with searching marks that ultimately reveal, giving form to human emotions that are extremely difficult to articulate. 

Long liberated from any stylistic or material constraints, Thoma Hall freely mixes a variety of material into her paintings with vigor. Using a favored technique of the surrealists, she integrates collage into paintings, printing images onto canvas from art history or photo archives, then cutting and pasting elements into her painted compositions with unexpected combinations that create entirely new contexts. Often figurative, these works mix historical paintings, pop culture, and elements of nature to question gender roles and the hierarchy of power. Through the combination of collage with figuration and abstraction, the human form is simultaneously constructed and obliterated - along with the patriarchy. In this regard Thoma Hall uses humor and a feminine touch, to explore her point.  She has long been interested in cross gender ideas, believing in a fluidity of male/female psyche and that to solve the complex problems humanity faces, we need more wisdom offered from the woman’s perspective or the maternal spirit that exists in both men and woman. Carl Jung describes this fluidity as the animus making up the unconscious masculine side of a woman and the anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man, each transcending the personal psyche. Thoma Hall creates the potential of an alternate world by taking historical paintings of powerful male figures and reimagines them with an enhanced anima. Likewise, her self-portraits, such as “Self Portrait with Picasso,” portray her as a cross gendered entity with a Yin-Yang balance of animus and anima. 

Perhaps one of the most unexpected and exciting material combinations the work has taken is with the integration of Thoma Halls surreal 3D printed pieces into the paintings. Weird, ugly, wonderful and fascinating, these sculptural elements seem to have materialized out of the subconscious and are incorporated into Hall’s fantastical multilayered canvases. Sometime figurative, the sculptures are surreal anatomical abstractions, like the female form in “Split Milk” who has an impossibly large distorted breast that dwarfs the figure and resembles the gesture of a spontaneous brush stroke of flesh spread atop a canvas of atmospheric color. Other sculptures alter and duplicate once recognizable forms, like unicorns or crowns, to resemble pieces of coral, or partially disintegrating, sun-bleached toys that have been weathered while circulating the ocean and have now washed in after years at sea. These elements find a fluid place in Hall’s paintings that constantly reference water. Others printed pieces are replicated forms that resemble bone fragments or parts of a spine, that combine with paintings like a séance, making them other worldly images about the transitoriness of all life and premonitions of death.

Surrealists sought to make a new reality out of the poetic combination of disparate entities. Thoma Hall uses contradictory pairings of abstraction and figuration, hyper realism and cartoon, nature and nurture, history and dreams, in multidimensional juxtapositions to make a new reality all her own. With no linier rules or guide, other than spirits, intuition and the collective unconscious, her work is the poetic combination of the material and the conceptual which is difficult to categorize or describe, much like the complex human emotions her work conveys. As an artist she has the temerity to believe in the possibility of another world, and the bravery to live there.

“I have spent a lifetime working as a surrealist artist exploring the spirits and mysteries of life, informed through spirits and what emerges in my dreams and imagination. I have worked with awareness, wanting to connect to others with imagery that expressed a common humanity such as vulnerability, resilience, a soft touch with a strong will, and joy. I peered deep inside to bring forth a unique expression as a woman.”