Open Studios: Artist Spotlight, Matt Gee
Workshop at the Rum Factory Open Studios
Artist Matt Gee from Bow Art’s Rum Factory Studios will host a casting workshop for visiting participants. He will demonstrate how to use Alginate Impression compound to create a detailed mould of an object of your choice, to then use to create multiple delicate casts out of Plaster of Paris. ‘Multiples’ can be integral to starting points of an artistic process, Matt and other contemporary artists such as David Altjmed and Roxy Paine, who have both used replications of certain casts to ultimately create larger sculptures.
Matt will do give a short presentation on how ‘multiples’ can be integral to starting points of an artistic process, which anyone is welcome to attend, at 3pm. The workshop will then go ahead with a limited capacity of 4 places, to ensure the quality of time and outcome from your session. You can book via Eventbrite here, the price includes all materials and you will walk away with your very own ‘copy’. You can bring your own small object, say fist size as a guide, or use one of Matt’s many found objects to replicate.
Matt Gee examines a fascination for the elements within society’s demanding modern materialistic culture and the sensory routes of this decadent desire. Pairing artificial and natural in paradox within the work, Gee heightens curiosity to question our understanding of and relationship with severe global environmental issues including pollution and contamination.
Applying this dichotomy of synthetic vs. authentic to methods of imitation, replication and manipulation, and finally elevating this with recognised methods of display; objects become realised for their inherent disparate aesthetic qualities, technologies and physicality. Photographs of naturally occurring processes, and seductive textures confronting organic form with manmade properties influence the work as well as human behaviour and relationship to them.
Bending, melting, tearing and crushing become polite processes to combine incongruous objects, seamlessly unified with geometric alignments, and associations of colour and form. A language of neon perspex and washed up seashells appear as a binding construct and note to ‘endurance’ through the work. Crystals are also a key composite. Naturally evolving in irregular patterns, Gee cultivates their growth on surfaces to replicate familiar human illustrations as a comment on particular geopolitical affairs.
The resultant compositions are uncomfortable and jarring, yet symmetrically pleasing exotic treasures. Addressing the uncanny perception of material with a truthful articulation, the work diagnoses our current object-based obsessions, directing them intimately closer and simultaneously more distant under inspection.
Rebecca Sainsot-Reynolds, Studios Administrator
