Thompto’s practice is strongly rooted in her experience as a transwoman. The act of transitioning, while a deeply personal process, is also a politicized act—throwing into sharp relief the inadequacies of her learned perspective of gender as binary system. This can be seen as an entry point into her work; how a binary system of gender identity fails to describe our lived experiences and puts non-binary people at risk of violence and discrimination.
Throughout her work, intricate and deliberate systems (numerical and otherwise) are employed to create visual form, articulate data, and to allude to our habitual ordering of peoples and behaviors. Creating the works within a structured system allows for the a metaphor to form which allows the visual structure of the work to speak to the social and political structures to which she is responding.
Thompto received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Iowa and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has previously exhibited at Public Space One (Iowa City), Woman Made Gallery (Chicago); and Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY).
