The Sketchbook as a Sensorial Landscape
Gemma Thompson’s artistic practice exists at the crossroads of sound and vision, an intricate fusion where auditory perception is inextricably linked with visual expression. As both an experimental guitarist and a visual artist, Thompson brings a heightened sensitivity to her sketchbooks, treating them not merely as spaces for drawing but as reactive surfaces that echo her sensory experiences. Her marks are not passive illustrations’re dynamic traces of movement, noise, silence, and sensation.
Unlike many who use sketchbooks as static archives, Thompson treats each page as a live performance. Her approach is deeply responsive, intuitive, and in constant flux. Each smudge of pastel or trail of graphite becomes a remnant of an auditory event, a visualized note or echo from her environment. In her hands, drawing is not only an act of seeing but one of listening way to translate temporal, ephemeral elements like rhythm, breath, and ambient noise into something physically felt and visually tangible.
Thompson often carries multiple sketchbooks simultaneously, each serving a distinct role in her practice. One may house spontaneous visual diaries while another is strictly reserved for a long-term exploratory series. This habit reflects her dual allegiance to both structured intention and spontaneous creation. Her sketchbooks mirror the nature of a musical improvisationdriven by instinct but grounded in rigorous engagement.
The paper she chooses is far from incidental. Her tactile sensitivity draws her toward extremes: ultra-thin translucent pages that hint at fragility and movement, and robust, heavily textured handmade papers like Khadi that challenge her hand’s movement and leave a deep impression. On translucent sheets, the interaction between consecutive pages becomes a layered narrative. Faint marks bleed through, creating a ghostly interplay that recalls reverberations in sound subtle, ongoing dialogue between past and present gestures.
During her formative years at the Royal Drawing School, Thompson deepened this physical connection to material. Her training included intensive sessions in classical life drawing and plein air excursions along the Thames. The result was a growing awareness of how environment, memory, and gesture collide on the page. Her sketchbooks from this time are rich with life: figure studies, hurried impressions of urban motion, tactile experiments, and emotional notations. The daily practice honed her responsiveness and revealed the sketchbook as a dynamic field for embodied exploration.
Drawing Sound, Hearing Line: A Synesthetic Approach
Increasingly, Thompson’s practice has moved beyond the visual realm into an immersive synesthetic dialogue between body and environment. She draws influence from figures like Pauline Oliveros, whose Deep Listening practices advocate for full-body attentiveness to sound. For Thompson, drawing is no longer a separate act from listening. It becomes an extension of it. When she embarks on walking meditations through cities or along riverbanks, the rhythm of her gait, the ambient noises of birds, machines, wind, or indistinct conversations all filter into her drawings as visual murmurs.
Through materials like graphite, pastel, and ink, she transcribes the unseen. The rustle of leaves or the passing of a train doesn’t get described; it gets interpreted and translated into movement, gesture, and material texture. Her sketches often avoid traditional representation. They don't aim to replicate a form but to echo a mood or rhythm. This makes her work deeply resonant and emotionally evocative. The result is a body of work that lives in the space between the audible and the visible, where one sense informs and expands the other.
Her format preferences further support this fluid process. Working mostly in slightly smaller than A4 notebooks, she prizes portability and immediacy. Her go-to choice is the Midori MD Notebook, celebrated for its creamy, smooth paper that allows tools like graphite and pastel to move freely. This low-friction surface mirrors the very nature of soundfluid, transient, and continuous. The act of drawing becomes gestural, with her hands often in direct contact with the medium. She smudges, presses, erases, and redraws. The absence of preciousness allows accidents to breathe into the composition, reinforcing her belief in the creative potential of unpredictability.
Thompson’s approach is an embrace of process over perfection. Her sketchbooks are open-ended conversations, with no final answersonly the ongoing tension between experience and memory. She works with unconventional tools like Viarco ArtGraf Tailor Shape graphite, which offers rich tonal variation and tactile responsiveness, and the velvety depth of Unison Colour pastels, which allow for both sharp impact and subtle gradation. The materials aren’t simply functionalthey’re collaborators in her exploration of sensory transformation.
Even her choice of inks is deliberate. Sennelier’s shellac-based inks provide a glossy sheen, adding light and visual echo to the drawings, while Rohrer & Klingner’s matte finishes ground the page with subdued warmth. These choices affect how subsequent layers of pigment settle and interact. Whether she’s using Conté pastels or Stabilo pastel pencils, the base tone influences how the next mark responds. The result is a complex visual terrain that feels almost geologically layered, shifting, and deeply expressive.
Her experimentation isn’t confined to standard sketchbooks. Thompson frequently turns to concertina formats like the A5 Seawhite Concertina, which unfold like an accordion and offer a continuous surface. This format is ideal for mapping longer temporal or spatial journeys, echoing the structure of a sonata or a film reel. A single line might meander across several folds, evolving in shape and pressure, charting both internal and external movement. The extended field invites narrative and repetition, allowing motifs to resurface and transform.
Process as Practice: Risk, Rhythm, and the Unfinished
Thompson views the sketchbook not as a final destination but as a generative space field for risk, experimentation, and embodied thinking. Her drawings are not fixed compositions but reflections of a living process. The idea of failure holds no fear. In fact, it’s welcomed. Errors, overworked areas, and unresolved forms are absorbed into the vocabulary of the page. This openness is critical to her practice, reinforcing her belief that true creative growth lies in the act of remaining vulnerable to the unknown.
Whether seated in a studio, aboard a train, or wandering a coastal path, Thompson treats drawing as a means of tuning herself to her environment. The repetition of gesturemoving the hand across a page, listening, and respondingtrains her to move with the world rather than against it. Her sketchbooks act as a kind of muscle memory, preparing her body and mind for larger, more involved works in printmaking or sculpture. Often, motifs that emerge from these mobile pages resurface in her etching plates, collagraphs, or woodblock prints. Other times, the sketchbooks become visual labs, where scale and layering can be tested before translation into more permanent media.
The cross-pollination between media further enriches her work. Her background in music allows her to approach drawing with a composer’s sensitivity to tempo, contrast, and repetition. Drawing becomes a score; each mark a note, each page a stanza in a larger, unfolding composition. The emotional tonality of her sketches carries through to her installations and prints, ensuring a cohesive sensibility even across divergent forms.
What remains at the heart of her method is consistency. Drawing dailyeven for a few minuteskeeps her connected to her surroundings and to herself. The sketchbook becomes a living organism, one that grows with each layer of graphite, each press of pastel, each smudged line. It is simultaneously a record of the past and a tool for the future, offering fragments that can be remixed or reinterpreted at any time. The process doesn’t end with the closing of a cover. It reverberates into the studio, into sound, and into thought.
In Thompson’s world, the sketchbook transcends function. It becomes a terrain of exploration and immersion, a space where listening meets seeing, and where form gives way to feeling. Her practice is an invitation: to stay present, to stay porous, and to let art emerge not from control but from attentiveness. Through her hands, the sketchbook is reborn as a landscape of resonancea space where perception is not just captured but transformed.
The Sketchbook as Origin: A Living Studio of Sound, Motion, and Mark-Making
Within the multidimensional realm of Gemma Thompson’s creative journey, the sketchbook emerges not simply as a container of drawings but as a pulsating field where intuition, experience, and environment converge. It is the birthplace of her visual thinking, where impermanence is not feared but embraced, where fleeting moments are welcomed rather than restrained. Far from being a secondary tool, the sketchbook is a dynamic space for inquiry, experimentation, and transformation mobile studio that captures the raw energy of lived experience.
Thompson’s process often begins in transit. She draws while walking through shifting landscapes, riding public transport, or listening deeply to the ambient sounds of a place. These conditions inject her lines with rhythm, movement, and spontaneity. The drawings that emerge from these moments are not idle sketches but intentional responses to the sensory world. Each mark is a record of presence, a fragment of time translated into line or texture. Whether it’s graphite on textured cotton paper or pastel pressed onto an ink-washed background, the materials she selects allow for a heightened sensitivity to touch and atmosphere. The result is a rich interplay between motion and stillness.
Her relationship with tools is deeply physical. Graphite, Conté pencils, and watersoluble graphite sticks become extensions of her own sensory perceptions. These materials are not used arbitrarily; they are chosen for their responsiveness and capacity to echo emotion, tone, and tempo. For Thompson, even the grain of the paper contributes to the dialogue. A soft Khadi sheet, with its dense cotton fibers, welcomes multiple overlays, abrasions, and reapplications. It becomes a space where gestures endure, where lines survive erasure and return in new, evolved forms. These resilient marks often carry the emotional weight that later informs more refined techniques in the print studio.
It is this resilience of mark and materialthat forms the philosophical core of her practice. The sketchbook is not just a stage for trial and error; it is a crucible where ideas are allowed to mutate, deepen, and grow. Each page tells a story of transformation. The small-scale immediacy of a sketch becomes a memory construct, offering clues for future interpretations across media. Her process isn’t linear; it is layered, recursive, and open-ended, with the sketchbook acting as a kind of living archive of tactile memory and sonic influence.
From Gesture to Impression: Material Alchemy in the Print Studio
As her practice transitions from the sketchbook to the print studio, Thompson engages in a translation process that is less about replication and more about reinterpretation. This shift involves not only a change in scale and medium but a deepened commitment to material dialogue. The spontaneous, gestural marks of her portable sketches become the conceptual DNA for her prints, but their transformation into more permanent forms is never literal. Instead, the print studio becomes a site for alchemical reinterpretation where graphite strokes morph into etched lines, pastel tones dissolve into aquatint gradients, and spontaneous compositions crystallize into enduring impressions.
The tools used in the sketchbook have their counterparts in the printmaking process. The tonal shifts she achieves with Viarco watersoluble graphite reappear in the nuanced layering of intaglio. The subtle grit of pastel dragged across a prepared surface finds new resonance in mezzotint or drypoint. Even the underpaintings laid down in Sennelier or Rohrer & Klingner inks, often used as base tones in her sketches, echo the atmospheric washes created through layered inking techniques on copper or zinc plates. Each tool in the sketchbook foreshadows a technical equivalent in the print studio, allowing for an unbroken material continuum.
But it’s not just about medium; it’s about transformation. Thompson does not aim for her prints to be exact transcriptions of sketchbook pages. Rather, they emerge as composite formspalimpsests constructed from layered fragments, isolated gestures, and embedded atmospheres. A line once drawn in haste while commuting may reappear, enlarged and repositioned, as a central compositional spine in a monoprint. A tonal field created on the fly in a sketchbook may become the foundation for a deeply textured aquatint. These decisions are not incidentalthey are part of a rigorous yet intuitive process where each stage of creation is informed by the emotional and tactile qualities of the one before.
She is particularly drawn to ambiguity in materials. Graphite that mimics ink, pastel that behaves like shadow, ink that defies flatness to convey dimensionalitythese hybrid behaviors feed into the visual ambiguity of her prints. They resist easy interpretation, instead offering a layered sensory experience. Her compositions rarely function as direct representations. They operate more like echoesaccumulated impressions that convey emotional frequency and spatial rhythm rather than visual fact.
In this way, her work achieves a kind of visual acoustics. The act of drawing while listening becomes embedded in the printed image. The echo of a passing train, the cadence of a footstep, the tonal hum of a city of these sensory impressions are transposed into visual gestures. What emerges in the print studio is not a copy, but a new form built upon the resonance of earlier gestures. The final work retains the immediacy of its origin but gains structural complexity through its layered translation into permanent media.
Visual Scores and Sonic Impressions: A Continuum of Motion and Memory
The concept of the sketchbook as a score is crucial to understanding Thompson’s unique compositional logic. One of her preferred formats, the Seawhite Concertina Sketchbook, serves as both a visual diary and a musical timeline. Its accordion-like structure allows her to work sequentially, page by page, allowing ideas to bleed into one another. When viewed fully unfolded, the concertina acts like a visual score progression of tone, rhythm, and structure that mirrors the temporal nature of sound and motion. It is no coincidence that many of her works are inspired by music and ambient listening. These books become both records of time and blueprints for itheirvisual translation.
Back in the print studio, these concertina sketches became invaluable references. They do not simply inspire; they guide. A sequence of soft pastel marks evolving across five pages might inform the tonal rhythm of a print. A sudden shift in contrast halfway through a sketchbook may dictate the placement of negative space or void in an etching. The unfolding structure of the book mimics the unfolding structure of her prints are built from layering, pacing, and return. The process resembles music composition: themes are introduced, varied, repeated, and resolved.
Color also plays a pivotal role in her translation process. Before she begins drawing, Thompson often prepares her sketchbook pages with a colored ground. This underlayer might be a shellac wash, a muted ink field, or a matte stain that shifts her perception of tone. This chromatic foundation alters how she responds with pastel or graphite, heightening contrast and affecting compositional weight. When she moves into the print studio, this experience guides her choices in tonal layering, ink selection, and even plate treatment. What began as a spontaneous ground becomes a deliberate strategy in her printed compositions.
Her approach ultimately dissolves the hierarchy between sketch and print. Neither is subservient to the other. Each stage drawing, layering, refining, printingfeeds and expands the other. A print may inspire a new round of sketching, which in turn may lead to a series of variant impressions. The process is cyclical, generative, and self-renewing. This reciprocal exchange betweenmediums ensures that her practice remains alive, alert, and in constant evolution.
The result is a body of work that occupies a liminal space where drawing and printmaking collapse into one another, where the fleeting becomes fixed without losing its pulse. Each print, each mark, carries within it the resonance of the moment it was first conceived, whether on a train platform, during a twilight walk, or while immersed in sound. Her visual language does not seek finality. It seeks depth, authenticity, and poetic transience. The sketchbook, far from being a preparatory tool, is the score from which all visual music unfolds.
Thompson’s artistry thrives in this dynamic interplay between motion and memory, between the ephemeral trace of experience and the solid form of a finished print. Her process invites viewers not just to look, but to listen to the echo of gesture, the rhythm of line, and the quiet reverberation of a world translated through touch. This is not merely art made from observation. It is art made from resonance, built from layers of sound, sensation, and mark that together form a language both intimate and expansive.
Listening Through Line: Reimagining Drawing as Sensory Perception
Gemma Thompson’s artistic practice defies traditional boundaries. She doesn’t merely draw what she seesshe draws what she hears, feels, and senses. Her work exists at the intersection of perception and presence, a space where the visual merges seamlessly with the auditory. In her hands, drawing becomes a language of attention, a physical form of listening. It is not about representation in the conventional sense but about registering resonances, interpreting the intangible through gesture and mark.
Deeply influenced by the philosophy of Pauline Oliveros and her concept of Deep Listening, Thompson treats sound as a living, breathing material. Her artistic process mirrors Oliveros’s radical call to listen not only to external sound but also to the sound within the body, the breath, the emotional hum that colors our internal worlds. Ambient soundsrustling leaves, the distant buzz of a city, the echo of footstepsbecome triggers for movement on the page. These sonic fragments are not transcribed literally but are absorbed and rearticulated through lines, textures, and forms that reflect an internal reaction to the acoustic environment.
Her sketchbooks serve as both journals and instruments, capturing ephemeral auditory experiences in visual language. They don’t present a narrative; they don’t depict a scene. Rather, each page becomes a dynamic terrain of abstraction, capturing the texture of a moment, the mood of a space, or the pulse of a fleeting encounter. A smudge of graphite can express anxiety overheard in a fragment of conversation, while a sweep of soft pastel might convey the melancholic hush of twilight rain.
Thompson's drawings unfold like mapspersonal, emotional cartographies rooted in time and place. Each mark she makes is both spontaneous and considered, born from a commitment to being present. This attentiveness transforms her sketchbook into a sanctuary where the act of noticing takes center stage. It’s a meditative, synesthetic process that invites viewers to enter a realm beyond the visual, to sense the world as she does: layered, sonic, and alive.
This approach is further intensified by her physical method. Thompson often draws while walking, allowing the rhythm of her steps and the movement of her breath to influence her hand. The artist’s body becomes part of the drawing instrument, the drawing itself an artifact of motion. In this way, the work is never static vibrates with the memory of its making, echoing the paths walked, the spaces passed through, and the emotional states navigated.
Her drawing practice becomes a kinetic performance, where materials record more than shapesthey capture movement, affect, and time. The resulting pieces hold within them the energy of place and person, fused through a deeply embodied act of creation.
Materials as Mediums of Memory: Translating the Sonic into Surface
For Thompson, the materials she chooses are more than tools; they are collaborators in the process of translation. The physicality of the paper, the texture of the graphite, the absorbency of inkall all of these elements participate in the act of listening and drawing. Her favored notebooks, such as the Midori MD, offer a paper surface that responds gently to touch, allowing graphite to feather and drift like a soft sound fading into silence. The grain of each page carries a temperament of its own, one that the artist must attune to, just as she attunes herself to her environment.
She frequently works with a tactile arsenal that includes Conté Carre pastels, Viarco ArtGraf blocks, and Stabilo pastel pencils offering a different voice in her visual lexicon. These tools allow her to express tonal shifts and density in a way that mirrors the modulation of sound. The soft haze of pastel can speak to muffled sounds or gentle breezes, while the weight of dense ArtGraf lines might reflect a louder, more resonant auditory presence.
Thompson's drawing surfaces range from creamy sketchbook pages to handmade Khadi paper, whose fibers catch ink in unique and unpredictable ways. Each surface presents an opportunity to interact differently, to adjust the gesture in response to resistance or flow. The mark-making becomes a kind of dialogue just between artist and environment, but between tool and medium. The unpredictability of how ink will pool or how graphite will skip across a rough surface is embraced rather than controlled, echoing the fluidity and unpredictability of sound itself.
This material sensitivity is central to her aesthetic philosophy. She doesn’t aim to polish or perfect. Her works often retain signs of the process: smudges, overworked areas, uneven textures. These are not errors but evidence. They testify to the physical labor of listening, to the vulnerability of translating feeling into form. Her sketchbook becomes a space where the glitch is as meaningful as the intentionwhere each mark is a residue of real-time engagement.
The drawings don’t seek to resolve themselves. Instead, they linger in ambiguity, inviting open interpretation. A single page might hold tension, calm, nostalgia, or unease, depending on who views it and when. Just as sound is a subjective experience, filtered through memory, context, and emotion, so too are these visual responses. They ask the viewer not to understand but to feelto enter into the atmosphere of the page and allow it to resonate.
Drawing as Presence: Sketchbooks as Echo Chambers of Experience
More than a technique or aesthetic choice, Gemma Thompson’s drawing practice is a philosophy that places presence, process, and perception at the forefront. Her sketchbooks are not preparatory exercises or collections of idle sketches. They are repositories of attention, vessels for storing encounters with the world in its most fleeting and delicate forms. Each page is a fragment of a larger sensory conversation, capturing not what something looked like, but how it felt to be there.
In her larger studio works, this same sensitivity persists. Though the scale may change, the intimacy cultivated in her sketchbooks permeates her prints and expansive drawings. These works emerge from the same well of muscle memory, emotional clarity, and attentional discipline. They embody a continuity of practice, sustained effort to live in the present, and express that presence through tactile form.
Thompson’s refusal to chase artistic perfection liberates her process. She allows her drawings to evolve organically, accepting that some pages may never resolve into a "final" image. They are instead treated as snapshots of consciousness, each mark a response to a particular intersection of place, time, and emotion. This embrace of impermanence mirrors the nature of soundhere one moment, gone the next, existing only in the trace it leaves behind.
She draws to understand, to reflect, to notice. Walking through a park, navigating a train station, or pausing in a quiet room, her ears are tuned not to specific sounds but to the symphony of everything. Her hand records not the noise itself but her presence within it. A drawing made during a moment of stillness might stretch out gently across the page, while one born in chaos might jolt, overlap, or blur. Each composition is a psychic field kind of visual seismograph tracing the inner movements prompted by the outer world.
Over time, her sketchbooks become emotional archives. The repetition of mark-making develops a language that is deeply personal yet somehow universal. They speak to shared human experiences of listening, feeling, and navigating space. Her drawings do not demand interpretation; they invite resonance. Viewers may find themselves recalling their own memories of sound, silence, or atmosphere when engaging with her work.
What endures through every page, every material choice, and every gestural mark is a profound commitment to listeningnot only to external sounds, but to intuition, to the body, and to the emotional fluctuations of daily life. Her visual acoustics propose a radical way of being in the world: attentive, responsive, and unafraid to embrace the imperfect. It’s a way of making that values connection over clarity, vulnerability over virtuosity.
In a culture often dominated by speed and saturation, Gemma Thompson’s practice is a quiet counterpoint. It offers an alternative rhythm, one that values the slow, the subtle, and the seen-through-sound. Her drawings don’t speak loudly. They hum, they murmur, they whisper. And in that, they offer an invitationto listen more deeply, to feel more fully, and to draw from life not just what we see, but what we truly experience.
The Sketchbook as Sanctuary: Drawing as Ritual and Reflection
For artist Gemma Thompson, the sketchbook is far more than a studio accessory or preparatory toolit is a sanctuary of becoming, a deeply personal companion that chronicles the rhythm of her creative and emotional life. This unassuming object holds within its pages the pulse of her days, the quiet revolutions of her thoughts, and the subtle nuances of her sensory world. It is a diary without language, a space where form replaces word, and intuition leads the way. Drawing daily in her sketchbook has become not just a habit, but a necessity elemental part of how she navigates the world.
Unlike productivity-driven approaches, her daily drawing practice arises from a sense of inner compulsion rather than external obligation. The sketchbook offers a reprieve from the velocity of modern life, creating a sacred space where time decelerates and attention deepens. In these moments of tactile engagement, she rediscovers the texture of being. Each mark made is a record of presence, an act of anchoring herself in both the external environment and her internal landscape. The sketchbook becomes a vessel for a deep listening instrument through which she translates fleeting impressions into enduring forms.
This routine is not only about making drawings; it is about sustaining an ongoing relationship with perception itself. Every day presents an invitation to observe more closely, to respond more tenderly, to resist the rush and allow the eye and hand to wander together. Her sketchbook is a place where she re-enters the world not through thought, but through gesture. It becomes a bridge between sensation and memory, between the seen and the felt. In this way, it functions not merely as a space for artistic development but as a lifeline to self-awareness and creative vitality.
A Living Archive: Sketchbooks as Process, Memory, and Dialogue
Over time, the pages of Thompson’s sketchbooks accumulate into a formidable archive ever-evolving record of artistic process, emotional climate, and material experimentation. They do not serve as polished showcases or galleries of finished ideas; rather, they house the raw, unfiltered textures of her practice. Mistakes are left uncorrected, unfinished sketches coexist with detailed studies, and impulsive marks are allowed to share space with moments of considered reflection. In this rawness lies a profound kind of honesty. These are not curated pages; they are living documents.
The enduring value of these volumes becomes clear in the studio. When Thompson seeks direction, inspiration, or simply a reconnection with a particular atmosphere, it is a place, a sound, or a state of mindshe turns back to her sketchbooks. They are more than references; they are repositories of resonance. Each book contains within it the DNA of her broader practice. The gestures she refines in her sketchbooks often reappear in her etchings, prints, and expansive drawings, not as direct reproductions, but as evolved forms born from sustained engagement.
This process reflects a deep personal philosophy: that artistic clarity is not a prerequisite for creation, but a result of it. Thompson does not wait for perfect conditions or pristine ideas before beginning. Instead, she draws through doubt, through fatigue, through distraction. In doing so, she allows the work to emerge organically. The sketchbook becomes a space of acceptanceof both imperfection and insight. It welcomes the full spectrum of her being.
The materials she uses are not passive tools but collaborators in this unfolding dialogue. Graphite, pastel, and ink each carry their unique voices. Thompson listens to how each medium responds to different papers tooth of handmade Khadi cotton, resisting or embracing the pencil, the smooth glide of a Midori page influencing the softness of her line, the absorbency of ink bleeding into fibers with unpredictability. These interactions are not incidental; they are integral to the work. Drawing daily sharpens her fluency in these material languages, allowing her to work with increasing sensitivity and precision.
These sketchbooks, accumulated over the years, also document the slow evolution of her thematic focus. Through them, one can witness the shifts in her conceptual interests, her deepening engagement with sound and movement, and her changing emotional registers. Some pages hum with vibrant experimentation, while others whisper with subtlety. They are not static objectsthey breathe, grow, and transform as she does. The accumulated graphite smudges, pastel blooms, and ink stains become not just aesthetic marks, but traces of her lived journey.
Embodied Presence: Drawing as Somatic Memory and Creative Compass
One of the most distinctive aspects of Thompson’s practice is how deeply embodied her sketchbook drawing has become. Her gestures are shaped not only by visual observation but by movement and rhythm. Walking often accompanies drawing, and listening is an integral part of the process. These sensory experiences are translated into mark-making, transforming what she perceives into what she feels. The drawings become site-specific responses, illustrations of a place, but emotional, sonic, and spatial impressions of it.
This fusion of movement and mark is especially evident in the subtle irregularities of her lines. A shift in footstep, the sway of a train, or the cadence of a piece of music can subtly influence the shape, arc, or pressure of her strokes. These micro-gestures preserve the physicality of the moment. They embody the lived experience of drawing, turning each sketchbook into a layered palimpsest of place, sensation, and motion. It is this physical presence that grants her sketchbooks their unique vitality.
The repetition of drawing not only sharpens visual and manual skills but also cultivates a kind of somatic memory. Over time, her hand learns patterns and rhythms that cannot be verbalized. These motions become embedded within her body, allowing her to draw not only with conscious intention but with intuitive ease. In the studio, this embodied knowledge surfaces unbidden, guiding her through larger works with a coherence that originates in daily practice. There is a unity between the spontaneous and the considered, between the private sketchbook and the public artwork.
The sketchbook, therefore, is not preparatoryit is primary. It holds equal if not greater weight in her practice than the final pieces that may emerge from it. Its intimacy and immediacy create a space where risk is encouraged and where failure becomes a fertile ground for discovery. Her preference for notebooks that lie flat and respond fluidly to the movement of her handwhether walking or seatedis no trivial detail. It is an extension of her physical process, reinforcing the sense of continuity between thought, body, and page.
In this way, the sketchbook transcends its role as a tool. It becomes a confidante, a witness, a studio-in-miniature. It travels with her, absorbs her moods, and reflects her evolution. It offers both refuge and challenge. It is a space where imagination meets reality, where observation coexists with abstraction. Through this daily practice, Thompson nurtures a rare quality of attentiveness that allows her to remain porous, present, and responsive.
Ultimately, Gemma Thompson’s approach invites a rethinking of what it means to sustain a creative life. She shows that inspiration is not an occasional gift but a cultivated state. It is found not in dramatic breakthroughs but in consistent, humble acts of engagement. The sketchbook, for her, is not a preambleit is the beating heart of her work. In its pages, we witness the convergence of sound and line, of movement and presence, of form and feeling.
Her sketchbooks are not passive collections, are luminous fields, alive with listening and layered with memory. They model a way of being in the world that privileges depth over spectacle, process over perfection. In a time that often celebrates the finished over the forming, Thompson’s practice stands as a powerful reminder that the act of drawing, repeated with care and curiosity, can transform not just the page but the artist herself.
