[1] With items as simple as a chair lined up along the floor or as complicated as an image full of blotched colors, Tompkins gets her point across by allowing the viewer to get to whatever conclusion or "wall plug" that they find.
On the walls are "shallow, translucent plastic trays" filled with "watercolor-thin acrylic pastel shades" within, which Smith describes as a "lunar luminosity" with "skewed spherical forms.
[3] Tompkins describes herself as “a painter [who] aims to interpret the world around [her] and to visually reconstruct and remodel [her] lived experience in a variety of ways.
Selected solo exhibitions include: The Common Guild, Glasgow (2014); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2013); Currents, Studio Voltaire, London (2011); A Piece of Eight, The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, Glasgow (2011); Autobuilding, Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2009); and Re, The Drawing Room, London (2008).
Selected exhibitions include: Life Like Looking (with Arthur Laidlaw),[5] Efremidis, Seoul (2023);[6] The Persistence of Objects, Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, curated by the Common Guild (2015); The Grass is Singing, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, curated by The Modern Institute (2015); I Cheer a Dead Man’s Sweetheart, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2014); The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo Biennale, São Paulo (2012); and Watercolour, Tate Britain, London (2011).