Nature’s Figure at Midday – Matt Morris

Matt Morris’s work explores the relationship between the material reality of painting, with images whose nature are illusive, intuitive, and transient.

This exhibition looks at the interdependence between figuration and abstraction and how they inform each other within Painting . Working on both paper and canvas with a variety of media, Morris uses imagery drawn from life, Art history and contemporary culture, that are used as a starting point. Intuition allows the work to have an independent life of their own, by finding the form of an image and playing with how it slips between line, tone, and mass, as opposed to strict representation.

This position of interiority using intuition helps Morris to explore the physical, object reality of a work which contrasts the transient, unstable and repetitive nature of an image. This repetition is seen by using common genres such as the figure, portrait, landscape and still life. The instability is shown by the manipulation of the surface through scrubbings, mottling, scratches, revisions, and diversions, which create thickets, strata and thatches on which the image may be held.

Materials such as gouache, watercolour, graphite, oil, charcoal and acrylic are used in various combinations. These are used on either paper or canvas which are hung loose or stretched on a frame. Scale vary from the very small to large and are placed in combinations or stand alone to give a sense of space and continuation as if you were moving through a landscape or revisiting lost time.

Themes such as maintenance, composting, domesticity and the studio arise, float around and are submerged again perhaps like the seasons. The work is an ongoing task that combine to form constellations, a network that acts by pulling disparate works together. The work is diaristic in nature, not to be seen as working to a goal or manifesto, more as a record of time spent. This exhibition is intended to be a picture of work as it stands at the time, rather than predicting or demonstrating an outcome.

Matt Morris studied Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art where he obtained an MFA. He gained a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University in Surrey. He has exhibited widely in the U.K. including solo shows in Livingston, York, London and site specific work in Aberdeen. He has participated in the ‘Look Again Festival’, selected for the Creekside Open (APT Gallery) and the Federation of British Artists for their annual ‘Futures’ (finding the future of figurative art) exhibition. He has also contributed to the Pigment Farm research programme and the annual Colour and Poetry Symposium at the Slade School School of Fine Art.

He currently lives in Laurencekirk, Aberdeenshire.