Photo credit: Matthew Humphrey
Tom Fry
Tom Fry is a self-taught, London-born and based multi-disciplinary artist and poet exploring various human conditions through visual figurative expression.
Tom has been drawing and writing since a young age and then started painting in 2017. In the beginning, making art was a spontaneous, cathartic process in response to depression, which in turn developed into a professional artistic practice and advocacy for mental health awareness.
Tom draws most of his source material from everyday life and his own experiences, be them societal or personal relationships with the human condition, providing a refreshingly colourful dialogue about male stigma and mental health that attempts to alleviate some difficult talking points with his audience.
Tom also writes poetry about his experiences of depression, overcoming struggles with anxiety, addiction, grief, sexuality, and homelessness to help bring these taboo and under-represented topics into the mainstream for educational awareness.
"A hope of mine is to see mental health education in schools one day, something I feel is just as, if not more important than physical health education. It's something I wish I had in my life when growing up as a young man struggling to understand my emotions and sense of identity in the world. It was always frowned upon, for men especially, so the dialogue in my paintings and poetry mostly stems from these confusions that I then try to deconstruct and process. It's a confrontational process deep within myself with the end-game of developing my emotional intelligence. If I can contribute to this discussion with my experience and creativity in any way, then I'm doing something right to further the conversation, which also gives me a real sense of purpose."