Artist Q & A: Tom Burrows

For Tom Burrows' Main Level solo exhibition Clam, the internationally recognized Canadian artist reflects on a local, Pacific Northwestern consequence of climate change, and his over-fifty-year-long relationship with his now iconic choice medium of polymer resin. 
Clam opens at Bau-Xi Vancouver on Saturday May 10 and runs through May 24, 2025. 


Tom Burrows, Staminea. Polymer resin, 48 x 48 inches


1. Your material of choice, polymer resin, is a material with both industrial origins and luminous aesthetic qualities, enabling your finished works to occupy the liminal space between sculpture and painting, solidity and translucence. How has your relationship with polymer resin evolved over the decades?

My relationship with polymer resin has evolved over the decades chiefly through not applying a rigid subjective approach but allowing a dialogue with the medium where I learn from what initially appears as a mistake, a flaw. This discourse has led to an ever-expanding vocabulary.

2.  Your upcoming exhibition draws a poignant connection between the sensory pleasure of a meal and the slow dissolution of an ecosystem. How did the experience of losing your clam-harvesting grounds translate in these works, and are there specific motifs in these new works that directly respond to this environmental dissolution?

If not working on a commission, I have proceeded without a narrative in all my work since I ventured into sculpture, intending to make an object that exudes a sensory presence. When a non-objective work or a series of work is completed, I allow myself to experience it as a type of Rorschach test, which instigates my most pressing concerns as a social-political entity. Yes, I am saddened by the loss of my treasured vongole and, much more so, troubled by the environmental dissolution. I seek catharsis in labelling my individual pieces and titling a body of work. But the work, in essence, is an object with a non-objective presence.

Tom Burrows, Widow's Fire (L) and Horse Clam (R). Polymer resin, each 24 x 24 inches

3.  In your statement, you describe a deeply intimate ritual—gathering clams, preparing a meal, tasting the ocean. How does this sensorial knowledge reflect in the more abstract qualities of your work?

My work and the gathering and preparing of a meal are synonymous in that they are repetitive, a ritual. The meal is objective; my work is abstract and non-objective. Both involve cooking (gathering, preparation and presentation), a ritual—the taste of the ocean supplanted by planes of light.

4.  Can you share a little about your process in creating these luminous resin panels? 

The physical aspect of making the work is intense. I wear a respirator mask as I work, and my studio is essentially a roof, with whole walls open to the outdoors. There is the pressure of time - a limited period of time when the consistency of the resin is optimal for pouring and spreading. There is an element of chance all the way through as well – chance can yield an arresting, unique detail in the subsurface of the finished piece, or it can go the other way and cause the piece to break as I remove it from its mould. 

For me there are also unconscious elements – there are so many things I do that I don’t think about as I do them. I find it difficult to put the full process in words as it is so intrinsic to my actions when creating the works. 

Tom Burrows, Bivalvia (L) and Kwakshua Channel (R, sold). Polymer resin, 48 x 30 inches

5.  Many of your pieces resist easy narration, instead inviting contemplation through material presence. Has your recent work taken on more narrative weight, or do you still see abstraction as your primary language?

A fluctuation between narration and material presence has existed in the various bodies of work I have produced since 1965. Possibly, recent work leans more toward the narrative. Having spent a considerable portion of every year at my island studio, I am more aware of altered climatic patterns than if I’d stayed in an urban environment. I’m deeply concerned with the climate crisis.


 
6. You've been exhibiting since 1965, across different movements, technologies, and cultural moments. What remains constant in your artistic inquiry, and what has been most surprising in its transformation?

What surprises me is my artistic enquiry has remained consistent through the years – I have been working with polymer resin since 1968 and continually find that it is the medium though which I can most clearly speak and it keeps my creative practice flowing. Though it shouldn’t surprise me, most scientists, mathematicians and physicists make their major achievements by their mid-thirties, as do artists. Fifty years later, my work carries on.

The artist in his Vancouver studio, 2025.