MATT ARBUCKLE
SUBDUCTION and ABDUCTION
Catalogue essay by Lucinda Bennett
Subduction is new to me, a word that seems like two familiar words mashed together: subdue, seduction. I search the definition and learn it is geological jargon, tectonic plates dipping under neighbouring plates. Yet as with so much languaging around the earth, explanations are very dry until suddenly, poetry: …the heavier plate dives beneath the other and sinks into the mantle… crustal thickening, mountain building, and metamorphism.
Metamorphism is not metamorphosis, but it is close: both involve the idea of transformation, but only one is specific to rocks. When those plates slide over one another, the crushing weight, friction and heat forces mineral and textural changes in the stones below. Marble, the stone most beloved of artists for centuries, is formed when limestone undergoes metamorphism, recrystallising into something harder, the presence of other minerals influencing hue while impurities such as silt, clay and sand are responsible for the formation of swirls and veins, grit caught in the eye of the storm.
Part of what makes the language of geology so prone to poetics is the apparent disregard for time, descriptions of rocks changing and land masses forming offered without mention of millennia passing. Most of the marble we see today was formed in the Paleozoic Era, 541 to 252 million years ago, or earlier in the soup of Precambrian time – wilds so vast and long ago they can barely be fathomed, starting at the inconceivable beginning, with the formation of the Earth about 4.6 billion years ago.
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Wrench your mind back from the birth of the planet and you are here, in the gallery, with Matt Arbuckle’s paintings. They may look like slices of earth, layers of coloured time exposed wherever land has been cut or fallen away, but they are paintings, each line of strata formed by the folding of fabric soaked in pigment, left outside for less than a million years but long enough for dirt and sediment to collect in their knitted polyester grain, for a stain to take hold. This is Arbuckle’s process: fold, soak, stain, and slow march measured through routine and repetition, one action performed again and again until something happens; the churn of process disrupted by the artist’s decision to end it, hang the fabric up to dry, stretch it between bars, lift it onto the wall.
But there are not just paintings. Look closer and there are slabs of actual marble, ancient rock pressed up against something that looks like marble but isn’t, paintings born this year but evoking the poetry of geological time, the ripples, clouds and threads of mineral, heat and pressure. Having once worked as a paint finisher, using feathers and badger hair brushes to mimic the imperfections that make marble so desirable, Arbuckle could have chosen to continue the stone, to render his painted surfaces indiscernible from the rock. Instead, he chooses to respond to the marble through a process not entirely dissimilar to the frottage he has employed in his works for years, although rather than rubbing over a surface to create a ghostly imprint of the thing, he makes alongside the stone, responding to the specificity of its veins and hues to produce something like an echo: hard-edged tendrils of white stone become diffused orange-pink lines; a thick vein continues from rock to substrate, transforming from grey into a bright aqueous blue.
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I cannot hold time in my hands, but I can trace a seam from marble to polyester and what is infinite becomes intimate, not entirely knowable but approachable, tactile, now.