Peter Matthews

Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?

Peter Matthews: I grew up in the East Midlands region of England, a land-locked place where I spent the majority of my youth walking around the fields and woods and wondering about beside the River Trent. I took a keen interest in the natural world from an early age, and I attribute this to my parents gave me the freedom to wonder and roam around. On reflection now, after going through school and university, what I recall the most which left an enduring impression upon me  in my developing years was a rope swing I had under a damson tree, a little trickling stream and pool of water at the back of the garden, a beautiful silver birch tree, the majestic shade and greens under an old willow tree, and simply playing in the dirt, the earth and universe of wonder under my feet.

New Zealand film still, 2023

RB: What is the underlying focus of your work? In particular, what are the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide your artistic output?

PM: Actually, if I was to boil it down to the condensed syrup in terms of ideas, motivations, calling and creative and personal direction, I would say it is everything about thought but at the same time, it is nothing about thought. There is a gulf of paradox there I know, and it is not really something I can sum up in words. This question has been the fuel for thought over many a long, lonely campfires around the world. I guess, when I try to verbalise it, I am most interested in where does a painting or drawing start, where can it be found, how far can it go, does it have to come back again from the wilderness to be a painting or a drawing? What happens each year to the artworks that are lost out there in the wild, a drawing torn off the battered wooden drawing board and lost to the abyss of the ocean when my legs failed me, too numb from the cold to scramble out of the rocky Atlantic surf – what of what has been lost can be found again?

I work in a slippery stasis, in suspended salty state of being, where I am on one hand hyper focused on what I see, feel and sense, but on the other hand, I am lost, uncentered, untethered and in a state of flux. I coexist on the spiral arms of being manically present in the moment, mindful of every shift and change in the universe, but simultaneously mindless, set adrift on a murky yet illuminated path where anything could and does happen. This is the working process, the mental landscape and terrain which I work with when I paint and draw in and with the ocean.

New Zealand film still, 2023

RB: Have there been any particular influences to your ideas and work?

PM: Many, yes, not sure where to start with that really. Both of my parents passed away in the last decade, and those experiences have had a significant effect on how I see things now. I was always drawn to the wonders of where we go, who we are, where are we going, what awaits us when this mortal, earthy life transforms into what may be another dimension of being. I am very interested in fringe sciences, such as astral projection, out of body experiences, telekinesis, etc and the slippage points between subject and object, matter and medium, the physical and the metaphysical. I feel that art should try to make sense of humanity, life, the universe, and that essentially, as much as we are image-makers and culture makers, we are equally sensitive and earthly beings going through ever-changing spiritual experiences. I believe one of the beautiful parts of being an artist is to reveal and give a physical and perceptual form and experience to what is mystical and magical in life.

The ideas of presence and absence form a large part of my conceptual enquiries, and year by year I feel more connections with working in and with the landscape in ways which are a mix of many different cultural experiences and interests in how other people’s communicate and live with the land. I am fascinated by the diversity of cultures in Latin America, such as the Mayans, Aztecs and other indigenous peoples. I am drawn to their ways of expressing and communicating with colours, forms, shapes, materials, lines, etc.

During my days studying painting and fine art in general, I was and remain very attracted to the Abstract Expressionists, Land Art, Minimalism and craft and applied arts. I recently went on a pilgrimage type trip to see in person the magnificent earthwork ‘Spiral Jetty’ at Great Salt Lake in Utah. I have long admired and felt a close kinship with the thinking and works of Robert Smithson, so it was a very moving and unforgettable experience to stand out there, at the end of his spiral, alone in the desert, pondering about some profound thoughts about the cosmos, life and universe.

New Zealand film still, 2023

RB: When did you start to devote yourself to the ocean series and how has your art practice evolved?

PM: My practice before 2007, when I nearly lost my life in the Pacific Ocean in a set of huge waves while surfing, was based in the woods and in the fields. I also ventured up in the mountains and frozen lakes in the winter in the northeast of New Hampshire and upstate New York. That moment in México surfing and becoming untethered to my board was an epiphany moment, one that in recent years, also in the Pacific, I have experienced again in various degrees, the last time in a remote part of Chile where I nearly fell down a steep rocky cliff while filming.

The drawings in the ocean came about very organically. Many of the ideas come to me naturally and especially when wild camping and living ff the landscape.

8 Hours Inand With the Atlantic Ocean (Outer Hebrides) 2023. Pen, rust, earth, ink, adhesive bandage, yacht varnish and water from the Atlantic Ocean on paper. 56cm x 94cm (unframed) and 66cm x 104cm x 5cm framed

9 Hours In and With the Atlantic Ocean (Outer Hebrides) 2023. Pen, rust, earth, ink, adhesive bandage, yacht varnish and water from the Atlantic Ocean on paper. 56cm x 94cm (unframed) and 66cm x 104cm x 5cm framed

RB: Can you say something about your experience and artistic process when working with the ocean?

PM: It has always been a give and take relationship to working with the ocean. Over the last decade, my relationship with working with the ocean has also been very therapeutic and healing. Over the years, I have developed many profound, intimate and personal relationships with exploring and working with the Pacific Ocean, from northern Japan to the other side of the Pacific from Chile, up through Peru, Costa Rica, through Mexico and up to Oregon. As much as my relationships of painting and drawing in, with and along the ocean’s coasts are physical in nature, I am also captivated and deeply into the metaphysical and spiritual relationships that I have developed and cling onto as the years progress. Physically speaking, I feel at home on a particular stretch of remote Atlantic coastline in Cornwall, where I work and live within and on a boulder which fell in a winter storm about 6 years ago. Yet spiritually speaking, I am in a suspended stasis of being, somewhere in a salty, mirage like place that is far, far, far away on a sandy expanse of Pacific beach, not anywhere wholly, but a merging of places which I have lived, survived, worked with and found myself over the years.

Practically speaking, there are a range of outdoor living skills which I use and develop when working on the coasts, skills such as fire building, shelter building, water and food foraging, tool making, etc are all used on every trip I make when I set out on a project. I take very little out there, and I am reminded of the adage that the more you know of how to live with nature, the less you need to carry or have with you. I make caches of food and water, hidden – sometimes lost in the process, in the rocks, under the sand or in the trees. I camp out when I work, and often as I work more and more remotely and intentionally into the wild, I tone down some of the risks I used to push myself with several years earlier. I once saw a person fall from the rocks on a beach in Taiwan, in 2016, and that person sadly passed away even with myself trying to help them the best I could. I too have nearly lost my life several times, either getting too, driving away from or being on the coast. There is very precarious place of vulnerability that one puts themselves in when working in solitude out there in remote places in the landscape. I have come to respect the ocean immensely, and also my ability to read the landscape, read and interpret the language of the ocean. I have become very attuned to being sensitive as an observer, and all the reflective thinking one does when immersed in the landscape alone, while in that heighted sense of reverie and in that endless search for the sublime, I guess I have become the ocean and the ocean has become me over the years.

New Zealand film still, 2023

Utah, 2023. Oil, oil stick, earth matter, stones from the desert of Utah and coast of Cornwall on canvases from the Pacific coast of New Zealand and the Atlantic coast of England. 62.5cm x 74cm. 66cm x 77.5cm in artist’s frame.

RB: Do you have a studio or is the ocean your studio?

PM: I make my work entirely outside and have done this since at least 2007. During the winter months, this presents challenges in various ways, so I have learnt to adapt and evolve with pushing the process of how to make a drawing for example not only in and along the coast, but also in the winter storms. Often large spread of unstretched canvas I work on will double up as a shelter to the elements. There are a lot of considerations and relationships I build with a place, or rather what place to work with, and this might include the availability of fresh water or driftwood collections on the beach so I can keep warm and dry my gear when wet.

New Zealand film still, 2023

Weka, 2023. Oil, oil stick, earth matter, stones from the desert of Utah and coast of Cornwall and a marble found on a subway train in New York on canvases from the Pacific coast of New Zealand and the Atlantic coast of England. 125cm x 163.5cm. 128cm x 166cm in artist’s frame.

I have visited artist studios, of the more conventional type, i.e. walls, a ceiling, flat floor, electric and running water to hand, etc. Truth be told, I find these environments lacking something raw and, I am not sure what exactly, but I cannot feel or connect with that setting at all for making art. For me, there is a huge uncertainty in working outside, you make yourself and your tools and materials and media you carry with you extremely vulnerable. You have to act, you have to think, you reflect and you get outside of yourself. That’s why I work outside in the elements. You never know what you will encounter and I am intrigued by the symbiosis of how working with the landscape, not just in the landscape can inform and inspire the entire making process. As a painter, I believe a painting should have a life of its own, and being outside, miles and miles away in the wild, the painting can have that life and I am simply setting up the dynamics for that life to happen and the painting to paint itself.

New Zealand film still, 2023

RB: Solitude is an important part of your artistic and working experience. In many spiritual disciplines it is a practice of temporarily withdrawing to privacy for spiritual purposes. Is this a part of your own approach?

PM: Yes, very much so. It is becoming harder to be alone, to find solitude in the busy world of today. I have come to respect and love, value and appreciate silence, simply because it is becoming such a rare experience to have nowadays. I am not antisocial, but I do prefer being with nature than I do with people. I don’t get lonely out there alone for weeks on the coast. How could one with all the beauty around! The drawings I make while immersed in the ocean, they are a different experience than the paintings which I make, which coexist in the intertidal and just over the high tide line on the beach. In the ocean, for me at least, I am more immersed in solitude, it becomes amplified and magnified. I guess, when I think about it, it is because I find that language stops when we enter the ocean. We become semi-mute, and the activity in our heads that rushed about when we are on dry land seems to short circuit or re-route itself in our mental landscape when we are in or very close to water. The drawings are essentially a way to visualise, to visually record, what I can see and observe. I am not interested in a getting down onto paper what I feel, what I think. Thought and reason, logic and common sense seems to get cast away when I go into the ocean. I purge myself of thought, and so then comes solitude. What of what had been lost can be found again – this is motivation which I have been grappling with for years.

New Zealand film still, 2023

Karamea, 2023. Oil, oil stick, earth matter, stones from the desert of Utah and coast of Cornwall on canvases from the Pacific coast of New Zealand and the Atlantic coast of England. 61cm x 74.5cm. 63.5cm x 76.5cm in artist’s frame

I am reminded of a conversation between Yoda and Luke Skywalker, when Skywalker asks Yoda, what is out there? – looking toward the forest as they speak to each other. Yoda simply remarked, only what you take out there. I love that. I think being in the ocean brings us closer to a truth which we can get on dry land, and part of that is because, I feel, we can’t take much of our earthly self or possessions out there into the ocean. When we jettison the ‘stuff’ from our lives, whether when in the mountains, in the forest, in the desert or out in the ocean, we are transported into another worldly dimension. That slippage between here and there, that alternative dimension and time is where I work.

Chiclet, 2022. Oil, oil stick, earth matter, rain, stones and found objects on canvases from the Atlantic coasts of Iceland and Cornwall. 149cm x 130cm (unframed), 151cm x 132cm in artist’s frame. Private collection, England.

RB:  In 2022 you produced a series of paintings made along the Atlantic coasts of Iceland and England. Can you say something more about this series and its aims?

PM: I have been fascinated with the process of painting in different locations in nature, and then simply joining these painterly experiences together after the journeys, so that project was a continuation of that running idea and enquiry. That project was, physically speaking, one of the toughest I have challenged myself with. The wind and snow, rain and again the relentless wind along the coast as I mover all around Iceland’s coasts, going in a counter-clockwise direction was really hard to paint in. I learnt more about the climate, environment and nature on that trip, and it will forever have an indelible and permanent mark on my memory and development in my work. I fell in love with the landscape in Iceland. There was something really primitive and primordial there, I think due to its remoteness and isolation, and also I have this acute sensitivity to working on an island which is not easy to pen down in words, but it found its way in the visual and painterly language on the canvas I feel. I remember watching an artic fox in Iceland, when I was painting, when I hit a low with things, when I was stone cold and on the verge of giving up. I could certainly communicate with the fox, just like I do with other animals and insects around the world where I work. We got through it in the end is my conclusion, but those experiences always happen. I am a big believer in animal totems, meanings, messages, symbolism and those things which are communicated spiritually in the light, in the rain, carried on the wind, seen in the water, felt beside a fire and so on. So, Iceland was like that for me a lot. I felt very close to this presence there. It doesn’t come quickly, and you need to sit and wait, be silent and then it comes, gradually, and you can converse with this presence and energy. We are never truly alone. And we are never truly where we are, ever.

Condor, 2022. Oil, oil stick, earth matter, rain, stones and found objects on canvases from the Atlantic coasts of Iceland and Cornwall. 142cm x 163cm (unframed), 144cm x 165cm in artist’s frame.

RB: Can you say something about your video works Rewind and What Goes Up Must Come Down ?

PM: I made those video works in the depths of covid-19 while I was working on the Creative Coasts Fellowship at Swansea University. It was an opportunity to come out of the wilderness for a while and glean knowledge and new insights into the worlds of marine biology by collaborating with a marine scientist. I met Dr Ruth Callaway during the fellowship time and I fondly remember my time walking around beach and bay in Swansea leaning about the marine habitat and organisms that were in such extreme abundance yet hidden away to the casual eye as the organisms, such as marine worms, existed a few centimetres below the surface of the sand. Meeting and sharing ideas and experiences with a marine biologist certainly reframed my curious mind and how, from altering one’s perspective or perceptual angle on the natural world, everything I knew and since observed and thought about was different.

Also, owing to travel restrictions during that time, I took very romantically and emotionally to the barren, wind-swept Swansea Bay – which has the second highest tidal range in the world. For me, Swansea Bay during that fellowship time in 2020 became like a live, tangible, tactile and emotional replacement to the vast stretches of Pacific Ocean beach that I deeply missed. I think without the fellowship and those long days wondering about along the far reaches of Swansea Bay during low tide, I would have most likely had gone mad. There were many personal and private conversations I had with myself and the universe, all lost to the winds of time now, along that salty vast plain of Swansea Bay. The Bay became like a friend, I learnt to trust it, be tender and soft again in that place, and it was without a doubt very therapeutic for that troubled time I went through, psychologically and mentally speaking. I remember that time we went through as so unsettling and peculiar.

Everything thing we took for granted or had grown up to realise and identify as normal had been turned upside down and inside out. I guess in the video works I was trying to make sense of those perceptions of reality which each day seemed so much odder than the day before.  In the video works, the medium and instantaneous image-making media found a way to communicate and capture something of myself that painting or drawing wouldn’t get close to. I sometimes watch those video works again now. They speak to me, and I see myself, my corporeal self, in a landscape which was on one had a beautiful and peaceful, yet also savage, raw and unsettling. We came through it, we came through it.

RB: What future projects are you currently working on?

PM: I am always in an emotional and conceptual stasis of being here, such as somewhere on the Atlantic coast of England, waiting in the non-space and non-place of an airport or just wondering about with a significant part of myself dreaming of being on a wild Pacific Ocean beach. Over the years, I have come to realise and embrace that this might be my life from here on out. We can never truly ever be in one place. We are never where we are, fully, spiritually, mentally, emotionally and so on. So as much as my artworks are made in places which are destinations of on the track of an ending when travel has happened, my artworks also coexist in this stasis of being nowhere, wondering, waiting, transitioning, leaving a place, arriving at a place. I would like to get back to the Pacific Ocean soon. I have the better part of myself out there, a little bit somewhere in México, a little in Japan, parts of myself along the Pacific coast in Chile, Peru and New Zealand. I often do not know what will be next for the projects, I just keep an open mind, go with the flow. I am always asking the universe for the next direction, for a light to shine out yonder and guide me, and when I am quiet, still, calm, the path presents itself and one must follow it. Self-maddening as that process of being might be, I trust in it whole heartedly.

‘Seismic: Art Meets Science’, Giant Gallery, Bournemouth, UK, installation

‘Seismic: Art Meets Science’, Giant Gallery, Bournemouth, UK, installation

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https://petermatthews.org/

All images copyright and courtesy of Peter Matthews

Art, Consciousness, Creativity, Environment, Imagination, Performance, Science, Water