Three Years is a deeply personal exploration of art created during the first three years of Matthew’s journey into parenthood. Matthew’s older daughter turned three a few days after the show opened and his second daughter was be about three months old.
The Fecundity #1-8 collages feature photographs that Matthew has taken on his phone of a variety of arrangements or objects that he has seen. Some of these are things produced as byproducts of looking after a child: piles of discarded food, arrangements of toys and clothes. Pasted onto the aluminium alongside these are images made with his daughter with felt tip pens, or ink stamps featuring her favourite TV characters. Each of the collages also contains a self-portrait in the form of a photo of the sole of his foot over the months he was living with and then receiving treatment for a verruca. The collages are an attempt to capture and offer up the wildly uneven texture of the materials encountered and produced in daily life. There is always more. More mess, more toys, more food thrown on the floor, more clothes to wash, more fly tipped rubbish, more weeds, more life. Nothing can be erased but only tidied away before it all spills back out again.
The little sculptures also try to capture these noticed moments of growth or accidental creativity, but in 3D form. Made from kids’ stickers, hair clips, dental floss, blu tac, dried up contact lenses and their cases, cable ties, latex gloves and wet wipes. The sculptures are minor, almost incidental in their forms. What is the minimum that an artwork can be?
There’s a video called ‘Minor Work’, made in 2022, a year after Matthew’s first daughter was born. The video tells the story of the artist’s slow realisation that he didn’t have any time to make artwork. It offers the philosophical basis of the show: Can you be an artist if you don’t have time to make art? Is it enough just to notice things, and to be interested in what you notice?
Finally, an animation called ‘In Lieu of the Work’ which was made over the three months after his second daughter was born. This features a character based on the mythical figure of the Green Man walking through various landscapes. The character has Matthew’s voice, and he talks directly to the audience, trying to explain why this isn’t the work he wanted to make. He apologises, makes excuses, and tries to explain some of the other work in the exhibition. Then he sings a song written by the musician Nicolas Burrows, from the band Fell.
