Regina Torres Thompson
Palimpsest, 2025, stoneware clay and glaze, H 31 x W 13.5 x L 9 cm, £1,125
About this work:
A palimpsest is a surface that has been written on, erased, and written over again, while still carrying traces of what came before. The word comes from the Ancient Greek palin, meaning “again,” and psāō, “to scrape.” Historically, palimpsests were often made from parchment, a form of animal skin, where older writing was removed so the surface could be reused. Yet the erased text would sometimes return faintly over time, appearing beneath the newer layer.
In this work, I think of the body and the home as palimpsests. I have always imagined the sense of home as a second skin, which makes me question how far that skin can stretch. What creates the boundary of a place, a room, or a house? A home is not neutral. It absorbs what is lived inside it: silence, routine, contradiction, care, waiting, and all the things that are never fully spoken. Over time, it holds a shape, and the body begins to carry that shape too.
Palimpsest connects to the exhibition theme through memory and migration. The piece holds a tension between body, home and container. For me, it speaks about the body as something that carries places. A migrant body does not leave one place and arrive empty somewhere else. It accumulates layers. It carries language, habits, memories, grief and ways of performing in the world.
Rather than seeing identity as fixed, the work thinks of the self as something that keeps being formed and rewritten. The body and the home are like a palimpsest.
About the Artist:
Regina Torres Thompson is a London-based Mexican artist working primarily with ceramics. She is currently undertaking a two-year professional ceramics diploma at City Lit and is a resident artist at Culford Studios, where her work is shaped through sustained studio practice, community dialogue and ongoing research into philosophical ideas of the body.
Before turning to the humanities and the arts, Regina completed a Bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her long-term practice of Aṣṭāṅga Vinyāsa yoga later led her to the study of classical Sanskrit and the textual traditions of yoga. She holds an MA in Textual Traditions of Yoga and Meditation from SOAS, University of London, and is currently completing a part-time MA in Indology at the University of Hamburg.
Her research informs her sculptural work, where the body is explored not as a fixed entity, but as a shifting and unstable site of transformation, fragmentation and meaning-making. She is particularly interested in different cosmological, linguistic and material understandings of the body.
She has exhibited and sold work through platforms including Margate Ceramics Market at Turner Contemporary, ST.ART Gallery, Casa Ágape, Warbling Collective Gallery, and Culford Studios. Alongside her artistic and academic work, she co-founded El Cuerpo del Yoga, a Latin American feminist research collective dedicated to critical approaches to embodiment and yoga practice.