Thomas Bliss (b. 2000) is a second-year Fine Art student at KHiO. Working across painting and sculpture, he constructs immersive interior worlds inhabited by figures that hover between the human and the spectral. His practice draws from personal experience and his West African heritage, paying homage to spiritual rites, mythologies, and symbolic forms tied to belief and ritual.

Bliss’s work is equally shaped by the rhythms of urban culture, hip-hop, and Western contemporary art history, creating a layered visual language where past and present collide. Rough, tactile surfaces play a crucial role in his process, reflecting an interest in psychological states and an ongoing search for beauty within the imperfect, the distorted, and the so-called “ugly.”

His vividly colored, human-like forms appear on the verge of breaking free from the picture plane. At once seductive and unsettling, these figures exist in a liminal space between reality and dream, often inhabited or accompanied by hybrid creatures that act as extensions of the self. Through these fantastical and ambiguous scenes, Bliss invites viewers into a world where threat and allure, grotesque and poetic, fear and imagination coexist leaving each narrative open, unresolved, and hauntingly alive.