ArtULTRA Presents: Thomas Sharp

Description

A poetic experience with Thomas Sharp

In December 2025, ‘ArtULTRA Presents’ was launched as a new live series spotlighting artists, writers and creative thinkers shaping London’s cultural edge.

The event at Proposition Studios featured poet Thomas Sharp, whose work continues to enchant and challenge audiences. Joined by ArtULTRA’s Founder, Alice Black, it was an evening exploring his creative practice and the role of poetry in shaping artistic experience. There was a discussion of rhythm, language and how words create new ways of seeing the city around us.

ArtULTRA was founded five years ago to support artists who push boundaries and redefine their fields and Thomas is unquestionably one of them. When Alice and Thomas first met 11 years ago, he was running his own creative agency and she was leading the Design Museum. Today, both are free agents - still sparring, still learning, still pushing one another forward.

Thomas handles language in a way that refuses ease. His is not feel-good poetry. It demands close attention and full consciousness from its audience. The reward, when engaged with deeply, is profound and transformative.

In a world where everything is compressed into slogans and shortcuts, Thomas offers something radically different: “unmitigated complexity’”, designed to disorder the senses. His work asks audiences to resist the narrowing of language, which inevitably leads to a narrowing of thought.

One quote from his presentation, lifted from Robert Anton Wilson, continues to resonate:

“The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.”

It is beautiful, unexpected and true. It suggests that the line between real and unreal is never stable. It is shaped by history, by people, by systems. It evolves constantly. Reality, in other words, is far more fluid and far more contested than is often admitted.

This is evident in today’s reality war: the ease with which populists bend reality, wielding language to create alternative worlds when it suits them.

During Thomas’ talk, ‘in defence of poetic experiences, or what did *you* do in the reality war?’, audiences shared a moment of rare depth, the kind that lingers. Many left carrying a richly woven tapestry of ideas, sensations and provocations that will continue to unfold in the days and weeks to come.

ArtULTRA is profoundly grateful to Thomas for launching ArtULTRA Presents with such intellectual courage, brilliance and generosity.