A brilliant night at the opening of the John Ruskin Prize meeting fellow shortlisted artists. Congratulations to the winners Curtis Holder and William Bacon. Thanks to the organisers at The Big Draw and to my friends who came along!
The exhibition is on until the 17th of February at The Buoy Store, Trinity Buoy Wharf, 64 Orchard Place, E14 OJW.
Mon to Fri llam – 4pm
Thursdays llam – 6pm
Weekends 10am – 4pm
Free admission
I will be showing a selection of collages from my ‘Death Landscapes III‘ series at the 6th John Ruskin Prize exhibition between the 1st and 17th of February. Organised by @thebigdraw, ‘Seeing the Unseen, Hearing the Unspoken’ takes place at the Buoy Store, Trinity Buoy Wharf, 64 Orchard Place, London, E14 0JW. This multidisciplinary art prize featuring 60+ works of sculpture, painting, photography and more.
Selected from over 4000 entries, the final shortlist of 78 pieces from 68 artists, makers and innovators have been given a “platform for the unseen to be seen and the unspoken to be heard”.
The members of The 6th John Ruskin Prize selection panel are: Narinder Sagoo MBE, Cornelia Parker CBE RA, Bob and Roberta Smith RA, Gary Hill, Dr Rachel Dickinson, Julian Stair and Jane Barnes.
Shortlisted Artists: Graham Short, Claudia Barreira, Nick Grellier, Keith Ashcroft, Fiona Hodges, Elmira Zohrehnejad, Pascal Miehe, Blythe Plenderleith, Belinda Ellis, Sally Muir, Lorsen Camps, Jared Barbick, William Bacon, Helen Restorick, Linda Hubbard, Julie Graves, Matt Lee, Abby Cocovini, Isobel Scarsbrook, Thomas Cameron, Muhammad Hossain, Olana Light, Anna Larin, Scott Kelly, Francesca Alaimo, Max Bainbridge, Alyson J Barton, Katy Shepherd, J.G.Fox, Patricia Townsend, Simone Guideri, Rhys Thorpe, Trudie Shutler, Lucy Stopford, Ruth Swain, Sally Hewett, Wyatt Carson, Kirsty Bogle, Maayan Sophia Weisstub, Alan Fortescue, Julia Polonski, David Aston, Helen Restorick, Zoja Kalinovskis, Olga Kataeva-Rochford, Eithne Healy, Frances Gynn, Emily Lucas, Blair Cahill, Lydia Adams, Donna Fleming, Duncan Cameron, Julie Barnes, Eddy Greenwood, Sally Baldwin, Antoni Kuźniarz, Caroline Burraway, Kerry Collison, Dorcas Casey, Kate McDonnell, Fiona Hodges, Pinkie Maclure, Zac Weinberg, Francesca Centioni, Chris Alton, Hanfei Dyson, Daniel Hosego, Curtis Holder, Sarah Gillespie, and Elias Mendel.
A one minute video about my art practice for Willesden Gallery on their Instagram page.
During the recent MA Visual Arts: Fine Art Digital low-residency, Smriti Mehra and I, Matt Lee, led a cyanotype printing workshop with students in collaboration with the British Library. The workshop began with an introduction to the process and looking at examples of cyanotypes from the British Library collection, including reproductions of blueprint maps from the Indian Office records and Anna Atkins’s self-published book of Photographs of British algae.
The morning was spent exploring the British Library archive and creating collages from an assortment of printed negatives from the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership project collection. This rich and varied material included historical photographs, illustrations, maps, iconography, typography, patterns and textures. To cite a few examples, a striking portrait of a Meccan woman in bridal attire from 1887-1888, a strangely surreal illustration of a Waqwaq tree from a 17th century Persian manuscript and landscape photographs of a Central Persian trade route from 1901. Using this diverse archive as a starting point, the students worked intuitively and conceptually in response to the images, creating juxtapositions, patterns, narratives and incorporating the technique into their creative practices. The workshop was an opportunity to play with the material to explore meaning and form. The collages were then placed on top of the photosensitive paper and exposed under UV light in a darkroom. The prints were developed, washed and rinsed to reveal vivid Prussian blue monochromatic images, which were left to dry and darken over the next twenty-four hours.
The workshop was followed by a visit to the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership project in St Pancras. Here a team of photographers, conservators, translators and cataloguers work together to make collection items related to the history of the Gulf and Arabic science available online via the QDL portal. In the conservation studio, we were introduced to paper conservation, binding techniques and shown examples of collection items undergoing conservation treatment. In the imaging studio, students were shown the plethora of specialist equipment used by imaging technicians to photograph a range of items, including Arabic manuscripts, books, loose-leaf items, maps, photographs and vinyl records. Students then shared their cyanotype prints with British Library staff, who in turn shared some of the creative projects they have worked on during Hack Days, where the imaging team respond to this historical material across different contexts. A zine by Hannah Nagle examined data and gender inequality through the collection, an animation by Renata Kaminska drew attention to damage in one manuscript caused by insects and Darran Murray’s interactive photogrammetry project of an astrolabe quadrant. The workshop and this interaction opened up a dialogue with the students of how historic material may be accessed by different creative practitioners, in different ways, making it relevant and being a valuable resource to build ideas from.
The tour ended with a viewing of a rare book of original cyanotypes by Julia Herschel – ‘A handbook of Greek Lace Making’ published in 1870. A selection of cyanotype prints from the workshop were then photographed in one of the British Library’s imaging studios. The intention is to create a zine for possible inclusion in the British Library’s permanent collection.
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For artists wishing to explore the British Library collections, their Flickr account offers open access to public domain images and encourages people to explore and re-use. Images can also be downloaded from the Qatar Digital Library, which contains collection items that relate to the Gulf Region. The British Library Labs also support creative projects that use collections in innovative and inspiring ways.
Course Leader, MA Fine Art Digital: Jonathan Kearney.
Students: Alexis Rago, Betty Leung, Friederike Hoberg, Kelda Storm, Leah Yang, Matt Fratson, Taiyo Huang, Will Wright.
Last week I led a collage and cyanotype printing workshop alongside members of the British Library imaging team for BL Qatar Project staff.
Using examples from the British Library archive, this workshop explored the vernacular of the cyanotype technique and connected it to the history of invention, photography, image reproduction and information distribution. We printed digital negatives on acetate sheets using visual material from the British Library collection, which included historical photographs, illustrations, maps, diagrams, typography, patterns and textures. Participants cut up this material to create collages that were then placed on top of paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals and exposed in sunlight.
A selection of prints from this workshop will be used on posters to promote the 3rd British Library Hack Day.
A new series of nine 5x5cm Death Landscape collages will be exhibited in ‘Size Matters’ as part of Fringe Arts Bath and runs from 24th May to 9th June, 2019. The show has been curated by Mark Fearbunce.
See the full series on my website:
https://www.matt-lee.com/death-landscapes-iii-i
I am very excited to have one of my collages from Death Landscapes III featured in Bonk! Magazine #3.2 – The Lines issue. Bonk! Magazine is an experimental print publication that showcases the work of writers and artists. It is also an exploration of the possibilities of print and design as mediums. They publish text, images, and design loosely organised around a single theme. This magazine, along with previous issues can be purchased via their website.
https://www.instagram.com/bonkmagazine/
https://www.facebook.com/bonkmagazine
Five new private commissions and additions to the Death Landscapes III series. Contact me here to discuss creating a bespoke artwork in this series. More information can be found on my online store.
The transitory nature of imagery and material examined through a series of internal landscape collages. Constructed with layers of cut bone white paper, these delicate and miniature relief images are made visible when light casts shadows across the surface. Light plays an important role in defining and demarcating space and in this series light enhances, affects and ultimately completes the work. These tactile yet immaterial landscape explorations invite the viewer to contemplate aspects of form, structure, line and space, whilst also allowing individual projections and inscriptions onto the visual plane, which both welcomes and resist embodiment.
Collage. 125 gsm cartridge paper.
Signed, numbered and dated on reverse side and comes with a certificate of authenticity
13.8 x 18.3 cm
September 29, 2016 Written by Mailee Hung
http://dailyserving.com/2016/09/fan-mail-matt-lee/
There is a certain playful unknowability to Matt Lee’s work. As preoccupied with structure as its inverse, Lee’s pieces suggest an interaction with the intangible that is at once wholly serious and strangely lighthearted. Confronted by subjects like death, absence, and emptiness, a viewer might expect an oeuvre weighted down by existential dread, but in Lee’s work, these subjects become lively participants in conversation with their environs. Though they offer little in the way of consolation about oblivion, Lee’s pieces propose a wry characterization of the unknown that is rather cheeky; death may be coming, but it feels oddly familiar.
Matt Lee. Untitled, from Presence of Absence, 2011; archival inkjet print; 14.2 x 21.3 cm.
In the aptly named series Presence of Absence (2011), emptiness is a figurative entity intruding upon the mundane. Lee created this series in response to his move to Bangalore, as he tried to make sense of his new home. A viewer might imagine the artist being surrounded by signs full of meaning but rendered meaningless by unfamiliarity. In the series, absence is made into an insistent material presence. As this looming void becomes more tangible and undeniable, its character becomes almost approachable. In some works, there is an endearing shyness to the black masses peering over rooftops or peeking around buildings. Lee does not so much demystify oblivion as render it surprisingly friendly.
Matt Lee. Untitled, from Presence of Absence, 2011; archival inkjet print; 14.2 x 21.3 cm.
Likewise, Lee’s Death Landscapes (2008–) feel oddly familiar despite their vague forms. Given Lee’s background in commercial illustration, all of his images have a distinctly graphic quality that makes elements of his work identifiable despite the fact that they address the fundamentally unknowable. The playfulness of Death Landscapes comes less from a direct characterization of death than from the oblique admixture of the abstract and the recognizable. A collage from Death Landscapes II (2015) is an eerie landscape, with ghostlike tendrils drifting upward from a dark island on the pale page. But from the center of this mass juts a bright rectangle on a pole—part stadium lights, part marquee, part basketball hoop. The result is a disjunction that feels playfully absurd, simultaneously serious and silly. The work’s formal reference to signage flirts with a critique of capitalism before it veers past the political and into the existential. It seems to say, “Sure, commercialism is absurd, but how about death?”
Matt Lee. Untitled, from Death Landscapes II, 2015; cut paper; 8.9 cm x 11.4 cm.
Matt Lee. Untitled, from Death Landscapes II, 2015; cut paper; 8.9 cm x 11.4 cm.
In his Death Landscapes, Lee’s characterization of the incongruities between the unidentifiable and the concrete produces an effect that is pleasantly somnambulistic in its strangeness. The viewer is asked to accept an unknown element as part of the visual lexicon, inviting it to become familiar while remaining mysterious. In one piece, a rocky black outcropping reminds one of a gate to the underworld, but the billboard-like sign above it complicates any sense of solemnity the form may suggest. This juxtaposition does not make the landscape more comprehensible, but it does make it less frightening. The artist’s overall proposition is a consent to the liminal—an uneasy assumption that the unknown is not necessarily an existential threat but rather simply curious.
Matt Lee. Untitled, from Death Landscapes III, 2016; cut paper; 13.8 x 18.3 cm.
Lee’s most recent series, Death Landscapes III (2016), is a more somber affair. Using collaged plain paper to suggest landscapes, these works lack the graphic juxtaposition of color photographs and black shapes that had given his previous works their liveliness; they instead convey a more tactile exploration. Their physical qualities of light and shadow reveal the landscape forms within a funereal cast of bone white. But while this series loses the playfulness innate to many of Lee’s other pieces, it gains a material presence. Here, Lee’s expression of absence is most tangibly felt—the void an extension of material form rather than a refutation of it. This is the ultimate ethos of Lee’s work: that strangeness is familiar, that the unknown is recognizable, and that the void is undeniably present.
Matt Lee is an artist, illustrator, design consultant, and educator. His work has been published by Gestalten, Creative Review, and NY Arts, and has been exhibited across North America, Europe, and Asia, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Mall Galleries in London, and the Alla Prima International Art Fair in Delhi. Originally from the United Kingdom, Lee currently lives in Bangalore, in southern India. He has a passion for Indian matchboxes, surf music, and preppy clothes. He can be found on Instagram (@mattrdlee) and Twitter (@mattlee).
The transitory nature of imagery and material examined through a series of eighteen internal landscape collages. Constructed with layers of cut plain paper, the miniature relief images are made visible when light casts shadows across the surface. Light plays an important role in defining and demarcating space and in this series light enhances, affects and ultimately completes the work. These immaterial landscapes invite the viewer to contemplate aspects of form, structure, line and space in relative visual silence, whilst also allowing individual projections and inscriptions onto the visual plane.
Full series: http://www.matt-lee.com/death-landscapes-3
mrdlee.wordpress.com 