How do you choose the images that you work with?

I normally have a pre-determined aesthetic on what the end result will be, and half the time I search for them, half the time I come across them and find them perfect. Image banks have quite specific searches, ie. ‘looking to the left’, ‘,blonde’, ‘in thought’, and I bought the rights for some of them. I wanted surfaces for some sort of rupture, where they seem to be exhausting themselves. To play with the language of iconography to a certain extent, to be streamline in the conscious or consumerable.

Can you tell us about your graduate show at Chelsea College of Art and Design?  The show was an installation of paintings, in the way that they had a relationship to each other. They were images of landscapes, a woman in a bikini, a spaceman, on plywood, with paint gestures on top or holes cut-out onto another painted surface, like aluminum or wood. These images are like petrified archetypes in a state of collapse, in a way that was entropic but stilled and quieting, and the images were absorbed into the wood, which was really thick and heavy, because I wanted to amplify their objectification. The ulterior spaces or poured parabolas were ways to create facsimiles of The Real, or I was thinking about The Real talked about in terms of this void or sanctuary that one could flood with reverie. So I was working through the packaging of The Real and it’s aesthetic transformation, filtered through this representational sensibility.

What role do you see the artist as having in today's world? I think the artist takes on many roles, as they’re often outside of most roles in today’s world. I was told a story on my exchange trip to Germany about a colony of mice working hard to collect food and building shelter for the winter, all but one mouse, who could only tell stories at the end of the day around the fire. When he asked "but I haven’t done any of the hard work for the winter" all the other mice told him how much they enjoyed listening to his stories, and that was his job. I think it’s quite a true analogy! I suppose the artist’s role is to re-piece things into a bigger picture, in a unilateral kind of way.

What pieces will you be featuring at the Affordable Art Fair?
 Two paintings, Field (Red) which is a generic field with a red body of red enamel on top, and a small painting of a waterfall with a purple ark falling in similitude, which originally was intended to be a sketch but ended up as a marker for this new body of work.

What are your plans for the next two years? I tend to hope more than plan; planning and ambition can be good but pre-empting anything can be detrimental. My hope is that things keep moving forward and there are plenty of surprising, opportunities, research and development, and no dead ends.

See more of Matthew's work on his jotta profile.

Read more about Land Without A Map and the Affordable Art Fair here.