Artist Christian Thompson Talks Art, Fashion and Getting Schooled by Marina Abramovic

Prior to meeting with Marina Abramovic, artist Christian Thompson was struck down by a ghastly flu. However, in a true Marina-style overcoming of mental and physical adversity, he pushed forward and managed to bring his A-game to the Kaldor Residency Program. As part of a lucky handful of promising artists, Thompson had the privilege of working with the performance art powerhouse earlier this year ahead of his current show at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

"It was amazing to have access to her," Thompson says. "She was incredibly generous. We had these one-on-one tutorials and I was developing this video work called Dead Tongue. I was trying to work out whether I wanted to pursue music in my work and Marina was like: ‘No. Get rid of music. We don't use music in the art world. No need.' "

"So I don't use music anymore," he laughs. "Coming from 70 years of experience, she has this precise vision of your work. She sees the strengths and disregards everything that is unnecessary. She even told me what I have to do for my retrospective."

ON THE ABRAMOVIC METHOD

Stepping out of his comfort zone has been somewhat familiar territory for Thompson. A ceaseless globetrotter, he has been researching and making art between Europe and Australia for the best part of 15 years. He is currently the inaugural recipient of the Charles Perkins Scholarship, and will be the first Indigenous Australian to earn a doctorate from Oxford University. Thompson also completed his Masters in performing arts at DasArts in Amsterdam, which taught an on-the-spot process of making performance.

Although Thompson has a solid theatrical background, jumping into the Abramovic Method was not necessarily a smooth transition. "Marina comes from a very different school, that '60s and '70s tradition of durational performance," he says. "I think a lot of contemporary performance art is more like theatre. My projects are like a series of visual scenes that have a performative gesture inside them, whereas Marina is testing the liminality of the body and what it is capable of. On the whole, performance is hardcore and I think you have to have a certain constitution as a person to be able to do it."

ON HIS NEW SYDNEY SHOW

While the Marina experience has enriched Thompson's performative palette, his new show at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is a bit of everything. The gallery is filled with a broad range of media, from sculptures and textiles through to films and photography. In the centre of the space, there is a 3D printed sculpture entitled All revolutions are led by the young: a curling mass of shiny black resin. On the other side of the room are photographs of Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton modelling Thompson's well-known woollen jumpers with comically elongated arms.

"It's interesting to see this show through the curator's eyes, rather than how I would represent myself," says Thompson, reflecting on the freshly installed exhibition. "I can see the potential of what a big survey show might look like. It's certainly an unexpected rendition of my practice."

Many of the works featured in the exhibition have been borrowed from cultural institutions and private collections. Working within a framework of cultural ownership and appropriation, curator Alana Kushnir has chosen to preserve the original framing of these works, playing off different modes of presentation. For instance, one of Thompson's woolly jumpers is allowed to drape onto the floor in soft folds while another near identical jumper is safely – and strictly – confined within a glass box.

ON BLENDING FASHION WITH ART

Although Kushnir pulls together a number of disciplinary threads, fashion seems to hover on the surface of the show. "During my undergraduate years, I was really inspired by textiles and wearable sculptures," says Thompson. "People like Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois really informed my early work. There's always been a sartorial aspect to my practice, but I also grew up in the 90s, which was all about remixing — no-one wanted to be pigeonholed or defined by one thing. I also had my nose buried in things like NME, The Face, and Cue. I suppose that fashion sensibility stayed with me through art school — it was kind of already programmed in."

Leaping from one big thing to the next, Thompson seems to have an insatiable capacity for pushing boundaries. "I guess being creative tends to be a constant process," he says. "I'm a bit like a bowerbird in that way — I'm always picking and choosing, hunting and gathering. I think I'm always cross-referencing myself too. Hopefully the evolution of a person growing from one phase to the next is visualised in my practice."

Collection+: Christian Thompson will be showing at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation until Saturday, December 12.