Matt Arbuckle catalogue essay by Emily Cormack

Emily Cormack
Time like a cut batter

Catalogue essay, Matt Arbuckle, Triassic-Jurassic

After the industrial machinery has passed through, the hot, newly formed road hums in the remnant silence, and newly excavated soil clods settle into place.

Sliced into this curving mountainside, the fresh slick road cares little for the soil it has dislodged. It is a testament to the efficiency of humankind, with our combustion engines, hard fired steel and sharp, angled shovels. A station wagon comes into view, gliding through this freshly sliced landform. In the cut batter of this mountainside is an introduction to the deep time of prehistory. Revealed in the road’s compacted cutting is evidence of the careful, relentless movement of time.

It takes a slowed, observant painter’s eye to pass through this cutting and see inside the engineered smoothness. To feel in the packed soil on either side of this new road the resonant forms of soil and minerals, fossilized creatures and carbon deposits. Orangey-browns flecked with white smudges, streaks of thick dark black, and blueish grey mottled clods of clay line either side of the road. Matt Arbuckle grew up in Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Here the soil is predominantly composed of Waikare Clay and Whangaripo Clay, with a spectrum ranging from mottled yellow and light brown, to very dark, grey clay.

To view these colours one has to extract them, to see them in cross-section. In this way, the displacement of soil does not create an absence, but instead establishes presence. Cutting a line through the earth reveals through removal. Displacement highlights place, drawing attention to the site with new eyes, highlighting what is and isn’t there, opening a space for the imagined. Matt Arbuckle’s paintings capture a similar kind of evidence. The surface of his work describes a process of folding, staining and imprinting, holding the moments of making through extraction and removal, so that through absence the making is more present.

Land artist Michael Heizer’s artworks similarly occupy this bind between absence and presence. His large form cuttings in the earth examine the complex duality of negative space. His most well-known work, Double Negative, consists of two long, straight trenches, 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep, cut into the “tabletop” of Mormon Mesa, Nevada, and displacing 240,000 tons of desert sandstone, much like a major road excavation. The cuts face each other across the plateaus’ perimeter, seemingly tracing an archaeological line. The excisions establish a linear connection across the mountainous terrain, rendering the negative space more visible, because it is shadow that creates form.  It is not surprising that Heizer’s father was one of the most prominent anthropologists of his time, with the artist’s sculptural forms and cuttings resembling archaeological digs, or excavated tombs. Heizer’s cuttings are both negative and positive space, describing and displacing at the same time. 

Time can be told through the sediments in the soil. The sediments are not an arbitrary, constructed temporal threshold, but certain, concrete evidence of geological, mineral and animal activity. To read these sediments, another kind of cutting occurs: large tubular cores are extracted from the earth, each revealing vast millennia of earthly activity.

Arbuckle’s exhibition is named after the Triassic-Jurassic era (250 -201 million years ago) which was the last mass extinction event, after which over three-quarters of the world’s species became extinct. This event gave rise to the era of the dinosaurs, and this chaotic and catastrophic period in the earth’s history can be seen in a rock core from Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. It ranges from striped mottled, red-orange ochres, through to large ink blot backs and whites.  Whilst Aotearoa sat within the larger Pangaea land mass at this time, core samples from Tamaki Makaurau are equally revelatory. Samples drawn from the Onepoto Basin on the North Shore reveal a light-coloured layer of rock at a depth of 60m. This white ash (tephra) is evidence of a massive eruption from the Rotorua area 300,000 years ago. Further up the rock core, there is a dark layer, which is the basalt from Tamaki Makaurau’s many eruptions from its 72 volcanoes. In both sites events of inconceivable enormity leave millimetre-thin dust trails. The negative becomes positive.

Hooking the banality of linear time to these coloured spectral arrays seems limiting. Imposing macro markers, like lines on a measuring jug, upon the inner worlds of microorganisms and long extinct animate and inanimate activity seems too tidy; as if imagining a map might allow us to properly understand a landscape. In both cases, much of the essence is lost. Why describe a gradient by a line, or a place with a dot? How might these markers ever describe the sensation of arriving home, or falling and running down that indicated gradient? Time and space are lost to the map, not to mention the psyche.

Which is why in Arbuckle’s work the map is upended, folded open, the surface grazed, the content ghostly and stained. The map is laid on the ground where it abrades with the earth it describes. It collects debris - grit and dust and the accretions of time, layers of paint and the pressings of each moment folded in on itself. In doing so, the map begins to hold its own terrain, the tracings of negative space begin to form their own whole. The batter is no longer a cutting, but a form in itself.

— Emily Cormack, 2023