 |
Patrick Matthews, from Manchester, UK, is an award-winning contemporary British artist whose practice transforms drawing into a meditative exploration of form, presence, and meaning. His work has been exhibited in the UK, Europe, and South America. Based in Amsterdam, he creates works on paper that explore how material and space can give shape to states of being—reflective, fragile, and enduring all at once. His journey began with a fascination for the physical language of sculpture and performance, leading him to study at the Hochschule der Künste (HDK) in Berlin, and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. This diverse foundation informs a visual language that merges the tactile awareness of sculpture with the delicacy of drawing, resulting in art that feels both grounded and transcendent. Process and Practice Although drawing remains at the heart of his work, Matthews approaches each piece as a sculptural act. He begins with free, gestural lines—marks of instinct and rhythm—that gradually coalesce into forms echoing human presence. The process is one of discovery rather than design; each drawing unfolds as something revealed rather than constructed. Working primarily with graphite, ink, and charcoal, he embraces tension—the push and pull between solidity and space, line and void. In doing so, he reminds viewers of what the physicist and the mystic have long known: that matter and emptiness coexist. Every mark becomes a meditation on transformation, as though each line were listening for silence in its own trace. Themes of Reflection Central to Matthews’s art are themes of transformation, stillness, and the unseen forces that shape human experience. His figures hover between becoming and dissolving, echoing the Heart Sutra’s timeless idea that “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.” By balancing fragility with endurance, his drawings invite viewers to look not only at form—but through it—toward a deeper awareness of presence. Processes and the Human Body by Patrick Matthews For many years live performance and site-specific installation were my main means of artistic expression and in many ways, my present focus on drawing continues to relate directly to my earlier performance-based work. For me drawing is a very physical activity and a very direct means of expression, through which I invest my imagination to produce layers of meaning and possibilities of interpretation. I want my work to communicate a sense of openness and inclusion in which the viewer can feel to be a part of the artistic process and I want my drawing to express the physical and spiritual vastness which is both inside and outside and also passes through, the human body. So I use drawing to open up the human figure and let the figure expand within the depth of its pictorial field. My drawing process initially uses nonrepresentational lines whose intention is to uncover areas of sensation and possibilities. These abstract lines then inspire the formative principles of figuration and support the emergence of figurative form. The flow of these abstract lines becomes the figure, the figure exists within the pictorial field, and the field fuses with the figure. Furthermore, the persona of the figure is distinguished by the properties of the lines which form its "body", as the line's intensity of direction or volume literally becomes the personification or characteristic of the figure. The energy of these lines, unconstrained from the requirements of representation, ensures that the figure is full of motion. As the lines surround and pass through the figure as shifting space and hold the figure as if on a sculptural pedestal in close view. Through drawing, I am searching for a way to reveal the life energy of the human body and in so doing I am developing a form of drawing that is immediate and spontaneous. I am interested in both the surface of the human body and in the life energy of the human figure, which is inside the body and is actually producing the form. My drawing aims to describe the form of these invisible energies and forces which determine the human figure and attempts to render these invisible forces visible. Whilst conveying emotion in my mark-making and bringing the image towards a more sculptural realisation. Text by Patrick Matthews. 2019. Space Just as no sound can exist without silence, nothing can exist without no-thing, without the empty space that enables it to be. Every physical object or body has come out of nothing, is surrounded by nothing, and will eventually return to nothing. Not only that, but even inside every physical body there is far more "nothing" than "something." Physicists tell us that the solidity of matter is an illusion. Even seemingly solid matter, including your physical body, is nearly 100 percent empty space - so vast are the distances between the atoms compared to their size. What is more, even inside every atom there is mostly empty space. What is left is more like a vibrational frequency than particles of solid matter, more like a musical note. Buddhists have known that for over 2,500 years. "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form," states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness. The unmanifested is not only present in this world as silence; it also pervades the entire physical universe as space - from within and without. This is just as easy to miss as silence. Everybody pays attention to things in space, but who pays attention to space itself? Eckhart Tolle. The Power Of Now. Page 113. |