I turned to sculpture to help me resolve a block I was experiencing with painting. I came across sculptural works by Cy Twombly and Josef Beuys. I was excited by the way they could reclaim existing materials and objects but charge them with a different meaning and intensity. This resonated with an idea of a wheel, dragging behind a table, hastily and poorly constructed with irregular legs and assorted wheels. An odd cargo of structures, carrying some forgotten symbolic value. Fragments broken or torn off from a larger whole. From these twisted and charred forms nothing straight could ever be built.
The wheel in question was my neighbour’s. The rusted metal support, long shorn of its rubber skin was lost amongst nettles, in a holding bay before complete disintegration. This wheel became a motif around which I could develop ideas for a series. It carried this idea of entropy, an object that was exhausted and now in a state of seizure and decline. I wanted these ruptured objects to resist literal interpretation yet suggest references to symbols and structures that we can no longer identify or read.
This initial idea changed into something more domestic and less grand: punctured and broken forms that resist narrative but alluding to the turbulence and jolts that we all experience.
The drawings continue the thread from the sculptures. Drawings on squared paper, appropriating the language of technical drawing, yet depicting, with a degree of accuracy, objects that are already broken, impossible to construct. I wanted to draw out the conflicting idea of failed blueprints.
I found two possible sources that could help me with my painting. I started using an old polaroid camera that produced faulty prints with mis-registered streaks of colour. These forms spoke to me of a strange presence within the pictorial space. This idea of conflicting presences within the pictorial frame chimed with a concept I learnt from a student. She was drawing interiors and aligning them to the concept of liminal space. A literary term to denote the threshold between one space and another, a space of heightened intensity. That space could be found in the margins of the polaroid print. The faulty register of colour, the blank forms of flat black or white caused by glare or error. It was within these incongruous passages of paint that a potential, beyond the limitations routinely placed around landscape painting, could emerge.
Matt Phelps
Salthouse June 2016
I graduated in 1990, took up teaching 3 years later and I currently teach art in a sixth form college in Norfolk. I started to show my work in 2001 and have had solo exhibitions at Highgate Contemporary Art as well as exhibiting in group exhibitions and at art fairs. The work is for sale. Studio visits can be arranged, just give me a day or two to tidy things up.
Matthew Phelps 