Print (MA)
Matthew Dowell
Matthew Dowell was born in Sunderland, UK in 1994. He studied Fine Art at Kingston School of Art (2013-16), was shortlisted for the Gillian Dickinson North East Young Sculpture (2019) and is the recipient of the Stanley Picker Print Tutorship (2021). Recent exhibitions include Beyond the Frame at Orleans House Gallery (2020), In Review at Southwark Park Galleries (2020), and 2020: Insight at Soho Revue (2019).
My practice works across the expanded fields of print, performance, and sculpture. I am interested in how we define, occupy, and operate within space and place. I predominantly use language, both written and spoken, because it is embedded in our everyday lives. As a communication tool, language streamlines questions about space and gives form to it, whilst simultaneously distorting and disrupting it. I adopt anthropological models of working through recording signifiers of place: street and welcome signs, mapping and historical walking tours, as well as marketing and branding strategies with wayfinding signage by creating my own forms. These adaptations visually replicate the norm but on second glance have marked differences to what is expected. Subsequently, I seek to play with people’s expectations and modes of behaviour that are associated with it. My work aims to act as a trigger to instigate conversations, helping people to move through and look at place through a new lens.
Presentation of Postcards for Southwark Park Galleries Exhibition (2020) — Screenprinted plywood and Postcards
I Remember (Postcard 1) — Digital Print
“Inherent in the local is the concept of place - entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke..a layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth”
I started collecting postcards of my hometown and realised that most of them focused on three different sites consistently throughout the early 20th century. One of these sites was Holey Rock on Sunderland coastal beaches , I didn't know the rock and as I did further research I found that it had been demolished in 1937. There were still postcards of what remained but it was now referred to as Rocker Cliffs and these postcards continued until the 1970s when most postcard images of Sunderland disappeared. I couldn't get over the parallel timelines of the popular use of postcards and what they depicted compared with the umbrella narrative of Sunderland and its industrial decline. This project began in December 2019 at the time of the general election that had a simplified narrative of Brexit and Sunderland featured as a poster town. This was a simplistic narrative that I felt didn’t properly represent this place.
I wanted to push back against this with a different story.
I used the postcard imagery and layered memory to create a series of prints, as well as presenting the archival postcards and for the platform I have made a short moving image work to highlight the recurring structures within them that are narrated with the collective memory of Mackem voices. This is accompanied with a flipbook with a short history of the area, some photography and memory.
Medium:
Plywood, Screenprint, Digital Print, Moving Image
(Detail)
My Second Favourite thing about the Chippy
Chippy Fork (1)
Chippy Fork (2)
Medium:
Photoetching, EmbossingSize:
19x28cm
Walk Along (1)
Walk Along (Detail)
Using Michel de Certeau’s definition of space and place; put simply the physical geography and urban planning of the Mitcham Road are what make it a place (these are the static elements i.e. walkways and buildings) but it is the people moving through, bringing an action e.g. walking or talking to the place activates it and makes turns it into a space.
While on the surface level doing a tour talking about how the road/buildings have changed we also effect a change to type of space and without physical presence interrupted that flow.
