Matt Arbuckle
Reflection is Reflection
3 - 27 NOVEMBER 2021
Matt Arbuckle’s practice is a process-driven exploration of place, representing landscapes that are conceptualised through their very making. Through an experimental practice that favours process over outcome, Arbuckle uses elements of traditional Japanese shibori dyeing techniques to create abstract compositions by wrapping, twisting, folding and draping fabric over found surfaces and structures. The resulting paintings use depth and movement to trace and reveal abstract memories, imprinting the experience of place into the artwork.
Matt Arbuckle (b.1987, Auckland, NZ) splits his time living and working as a practicing artist between Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, New Zealand and Naarm, Melbourne, Australia. He graduated from Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2009. Arbuckle has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer (Melbourne), Two Rooms (Auckland), Vermont Studio Centre (USA), Bus Projects (Melbourne), Parlour Projects (Hawks Bay, New Zealand), Tim Melville (Auckland), Paulnache Gallery (Gisborne, New Zealand), Baustelle Gallery (Berlin). Groups exhibitions include ChaShama (New York), Drill Hall Gallery (Canberra), Hugo Michell Gallery (Adelaide), TCB (Melbourne), Hanging Valley (Melbourne), The Pah Homestead, TSB Wallace Arts Trust (Auckland), Arbuckle has also participated in Sydney Contemporary, and Melbourne and Auckland art fairs.
In 2017 Arbuckle was the recipient of the James Wallace Art Fellowship to Vermont Studio Centre, USA. He has held recent solo exhibitions in 2020 and 2021 at Two Rooms (Auckland) and Hastings City Art Gallery (Hastings, New Zealand). In 2021 he undertook a residency at Driving Creek (New Zealand). Arbuckle’s work is held in the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, James Wallace Arts Trust and Arthur Roe Collection.
Matt Arbuckle, Vice Versa, 2021, photograph: Tim Gresham
“Vice Versa is a large work that was made earlier this year, on a section of driveway in Glenlyon, country Victoria. It is a follow-up work to Recto-Verso, which was made in Auckland, and exhibited at Hasting City Art Gallery. Recto-Verso was a large draping work that consisted of the three primary colours and was painted over the cracked concrete driveway of my home in Auckland. As a response to this, for this current show, Vice Versa started off being soaked in the secondary colours orange, purple, and green. The relationship of primary to secondary colours between Recto-Verso and Vice Versa, is a reference to having a second home and being made in a second location.
Like Recto-Verso, Vice Versa charts both the physical and imagined landscape, and was also made stretched over a driveway – this time at my current home-base in Glenlyon, Victoria. As the work dried, its colours bled and ran in and around the driveway, imprinting a copy of where it lay over surfaces and the gravel it dried against.
The work is 2 x 16 metres in size and is to be unravelled in the gallery along the back wall, held up by wooden fragments. These fragments were used to hold the work down over a windy few days of making on the driveway. The work can be shown in different configurations depending on the space it inhabits, through draping and bunching. ”
Matt Arbuckle, Vice Versa, 2021 (detail)
“Moments of undulating pigmentation in Arbuckle’s paintings are evidence of the surfaces and materials they dried against.
Debris is repurposed into compositional substructure: yellow pierces a dark veil where a plank of wood disrupted the studio floor; uniform patterning echoes liquid pooling across the ribbed plane of a saturated cardboard panel.”
Matt Arbuckle, Observations, 2021, photograph: Sam Hartnett
“These works are made on knitted polyester, and to pick up the slight metallic surface the works exude, they are framed in aluminium. Each work has begun as a loose piece of fabric pre-cut to size. The work is then folded vertically, soaked in foundation colours, then folded again horizontally. Further rounds of soaking in colour and folding continue, and so the process goes.
I often begin making works in a bundle together, with fabrics stacked upon each other, overlapping and folded together. Over the course of 5-12 soakings, I will pull certain pieces of fabric out from the folded piles at different stages and re-soak them on their own.
In this process, while starting as part of a greater whole, a work then evolves into a unique piece, while sharing similar structures and fold lines as the group. ”