Dr Tom Mence is a UK based painter, practice-led researcher, stutterer and writer concerned with the relationship between dysfluent forms of dialogue and the construction of paintings.

With an interest in how the domestic interior can be used as a rich source for a painting practice to explore, excavate and catalogue, the through-line of Tom’s research is structured around investigating how both a Painting and a Stutter:

• Conflict with time’s perceived linear sequentiality by looping time, expanding and contracting time, dragging and rippling in time.

• Force us to encounter the stuff language is made of.

• Allow us to question how we think and, in turn, how we see.

His practice is reliant on these key lines of enquiry, in addition to learning, via the act of painting, from the canon of (predominately Western) art-history and its associated works.

Tom’s aim is to move the perception of dysfluent forms of dialogue from being understood as conditions needing to be cured (or made fluent), towards them being recognised as creative and beneficial disruptive methodological strategies allowing for something different, or even new, to be found.