Jennet Thomas

Biography

Jennet Thomas makes films, performances and installations. She creates absurd worlds that confound straightforward readings, in the form of sci-fi folk tales, musicals and unreliable lectures.
Her work mines connections between fantasy, ideology and the everyday, using DIY and collaboratively crafted aesthetics. It deals with themes such as how people process an awareness of ecological collapse, and the colonisation of subjectivity by technology embedded with neoliberal values.

Using a collision of genres, her work can look like experimental film, weird TV drama, performance art, unsettling comedy. Her longer-form film works involve characters with elaborate costumes and props in scenarios that are clearly outlandish, yet resonate with multiple layers of suggestion.

She has a hybrid live practice- combining intricate, often animated video in combination with her live performance that could involve spoken word, sound, song, sculptural costumes, objects and actions. She is a founder member of the London-based performance collective Big Throw and presented new live works at their shows at Matt's Gallery in 2024 (IT IS WANTING) the Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury in 2025 (A New Kind of Daytime) and at SET Social, Peckham 2026.(forthcoming)

Her work shows in galleries often as large-scale sculptural installations that physically surround the film, sometimes with continuous live performance. Recent solo shows include THE GREAT CURDLING (Whitstable Biennial 2022) ANIMAL CONDENSED>ANIMAL EXPANDED (Tintype, London 2018) THE UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM DEVICE (Grundy Gallery, 2015) She has had two major solo installation shows at Matt's Gallery, London. Her works also screen at film festivals, including IFF Rotterdam, European Media Arts Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, and museums such as Tate Britain and MOMA New York. In 2015 her experimental fiction book, THE UNSPEAKABLE FREEDOM DEVICE was published by Book Works, a parallel project to the film of the same name.

Jennet is currently Reader in Time Based Media and Performance at University of the Arts, London, where she mostly supervises Practice-based Phd students.

She was a founder member of the Exploding Cinema collective in the 1990’s, whose anarchistic, experimental film shows were generative of London’s vital grass-roots film/live art scene.