Carolyn Thompson’s first solo exhibition with the Eagle Gallery focuses on a series of recent works that use Penguin’s Great Loves publications as the source for re-readings of the original texts. Thompson’s work plays in conceptual ways with the context and tone of the books, which include Boccaccio’s The Eaten Heart, Freud’s Deviant Love and Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary.

In works such as ‘Til Death Do Us Part (from Virgil’s Doomed Love) she uses the original work as material, slicing away text, or painstakingly sewing new words into place to alter the narrative. In The Wicked Web and Heart of Glass, sequences of abstract drawings are derived from using the relationship between full stops in sequential pages of The Seducer’s Diary. The tangled, web-like effect of the drawings mimics the complex process of seduction described in the text.

Thompson has shown in numerous UK and international exhibitions since 2001 and her most recent solo exhibition took place at the Laurence Sterne Trust, Shandy Hall in 2012.

Her work is held in collections including the Laurence Sterne Trust, Shandy Hall; York College Artists Book Collection, York; MGLC International Centre for Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; and Frank Williams Collection, USA.