The Presence of Absence - Male (III)  is an artwork by the English artist: Tom Price. 

Tom Price's artistic approach revolves around materials and is mainly led by innovative and experimental creative processes. The artist thinks of himself “as working in collaboration with materials, processes and phenomena, and that the final physical outcome is a product of mutual consent.”

One of the artist’s favourite mediums is coal. The artist admires its aesthetic characteristics, in particular its darkness and opacity, as well as its intrinsic and functional aspects. Coal is indeed one of the purest forms of carbon, the basic element of all known forms of life as well as a very important energy source for humans. Thanks to learning through experimentation, Tom Price developed a firm mastery in this medium and now produces a wide variety of artwork with it. 

The Presence of Absence sculpture series was presented at the Tom Price solo exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA, in 2014. The artist was inspired by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, where bodies of the inhabitants were charred, destroyed but paradoxically preserved at the same time. In Tom Price’s work, the bodies of the models are cast using coal, recording their presence in the present time and as a suggestion in the future, once they are departed and absent. The figures of these absent people therefore become a memory, images of a physical and emotional void left by the disappearance of a loved one. In different and successive casts, the models show an increasingly obvious state of decomposition, symbolising the fading memory weakening over time. With strong visual impact, the artist invites reflection on the ephemeral nature of existence.

The series is made up of three versions of the male model and three versions of the female model in different states of decomposition. The indicated price is for a single figure and is the same for all six figures.

To discover more, watch the video of the exhibition Presence & Absence at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the artist’s first solo show in the US, in 2014. 

Photos: Jaroslav Moravec