Tom Osman - SHAT III 2026

III

III, a trio of artists who, between us, put on a good show. We are Tom Osman, Rae Clarke (Saltburn Studios), and Simon Wood (Simonsarthouse.co.uk).

We're at The Village Art Gallery in Skelmanthorpe (Near Huddersfield). Skelmanthorpe has a flag - a flag of community and hope. There's also a song.

My offering is twofold, firstly a thematic series of pictures and secondly a range of pictures that explore colour.

Telling a story matters.

My practice begins with the lens but does not end there. Photographs — sometimes one, sometimes many — are composited and overpainted until the mechanical record of the camera gives way to something more interpretive, more deliberate: a painterly image that carries the weight of a decision.

Each picture in the ‘You want it darker’ collection is a sentence. Taken alone, it may provoke or intrigue. But the works are conceived collectively, as a sequence, and it is in that sequence that meaning accumulates. The titles are not incidental — they are part of the text. They guide without dictating, suggesting a framework through which the images can be read as a continuous, if open-ended, narrative.

That narrative is, at its core, a form of social and political commentary. The world I photograph is the world we share — its structures, its contradictions, its surfaces. The overpainting is not decoration; it is interrogation. It asks what the camera chose not to, or could not see.

I think of this work as storytelling by other means. Not illustration, not reportage, but something that sits between — images that ask to be read as well as seen.

You want it darker

The human frame

The baffled king

A thousand candles burning

The help that never came

If you are the healer

Let me out of the game

... and then there's colour.

Sometimes it is colour that matters. We can dispense with form – but maybe, not totally. After all, abstraction must have an empirically justified grounding.

Colour evokes emotion – and memory. Memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction — partial, unreliable, shaped as much by the present as by the past. My work lives in that gap: between what happened and what we believe happened, between feeling and its representation. That and a debt of gratitude to the colour field painters.

Working in lens-based digital practice, I am drawn to colour as a primary emotional language — one that operates before meaning is fixed, beneath the threshold of form. The Abstract Expressionists understood this: that a field of colour could carry grief, ecstasy, or dread more directly than any depicted image. In the work of Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and Barnett Newman, colour is not description — it is experience. I take that inheritance into the digital image, where layers accumulate, fragment, juxtapose and – eventually give up an image.

Sometimes the image has theoretical overtones, quite often questioning how it is that the world is knowable.

I wonder what it means to hold something that cannot be fully spoken — and whether colour, however unstable, can do what language cannot.