Jennet Thomas

Misalignment Inside a Maze

The first time I encountered Jennet Thomas’s work, I instinctively thought, “She’s doing something similar to what I want to do—just more extreme.” She uses absurdity, handmade aesthetics, and repetitive structures to trap the viewer in a disorienting narrative—telling the same story three times, each version slightly different, yet eerily similar. I love that rhythm of “saying something while also not saying it.”

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She builds bodily experiences through film: coffin-shaped rooms, purple huts, masked characters. The viewer doesn’t just watch; they enter the work. Her installations feel like structures inside her videos, and her videos feel like rooms. This resonates deeply with my choice in Who’s There?—designing an installation that can only be viewed by crouching down.

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She also helped me realize something important: Absurdity isn’t about being weird—it’s about bypassing explanation. I don’t want to “make a point.” I want viewers to get lost. I love the quiet assertion her work seems to make: “You don’t have to understand, but you’ll definitely remember.”