As the World Slips by, Untouchable and Illusory

Incentive / Influence

The world is a fragmentary place made up of glimpsed reflections and layered sensations. My work relates to the way the world is experienced, filtered and understood and how we deform the natural with personal interpretations, subjective and emotional responses, amid endlessly shifting relationships.

From a World Cluttered with Synthetic Simulations

Material: source / content

Material is taken from the fabric of culture that constructs the visible world around us. Media is our reality, and our nature. The images in my work were developed using found material; printed or downloaded from film, photography, art and nature. Material content often includes images of ephemerality; water, reflection, movement, transparency and shadow - surfaces that multiply the world around; layers upon layers; creating ambiguous and partially hidden spaces, and a sense of presence through absence.                                                                                   

Form, Deform, Reform - and the Process of Transformation through Chance Occurrences

Process                                                                                  

Using instinct, intuition and chance to generate images which are then edited using layering processes and liquefying filters in Photoshop to develop digital collages which are then remixed by deconstructing, recycling and even cannibalising earlier works. The liquefying stage is captured mid-process: arrested at some point in its development creating a unique result which cannot be replicated. The process is organic and accumulative - layer upon layer, new on top of old. Visual events mount up in unexpected ways and from that point the work takes on a life of its own: through the teasing out of connections, images dissolve and reassemble creating new relationships and compositions. The resulting work, hovering somewhere between abstraction and figuration, generates certain kinds of illusion, depth, surface and detail by forming a flux or weave of diffuse sensations; creating fictive spaces, accidental hierarchies and poetic forms.

Reflections, Distortions

Analysis

The slippage of meaning: or the impossibility of fixing points of meaning and the futility of literal interpretation.

As the world slips by untouchable & illusory; a meditation on impermanence, the fluid transient nature of life and the complex flux of events that form personal experience in an ever changing world.

Infinite Divisions, Infinite Relationships, Infinite Interpretations                                                         

Vaughan Matthews 2021