Matthew Herring

Artist statement

I'm interested in how forms and spatial relationships hold onto meanings, even when abstracted away from the world. I see my method as a form of phenomenology; as a way of grasping the world of phenomena and their meanings and as an exercise in stripping away the extraneous to arrive at the essences of (visual) experiences. A writer who has influenced my approach is Gaston Bachelard, who speaks of the poetic image as a “sudden salience on the surface of the psyche”. The greatest pleasure I find in creating art comes from the suddenness of the image, its newness. These sudden images are fragmentary and isolated, as Bachelard notes; one does not at first understand them, but goes in search of their meanings. The core of my practice is an extended series of, often small, abstract paintings, which might be based on particular things that I have seen, or photographs, or simply from the imaginative process of thinking through variations on a particular motif. Landscapes, engineered structures, films, photomicrographs, other paintings, packaging and small fragments of detritus have all found their way in. I like Walter Benjamin's insight that we can no longer master reality, even in fragments. The only way forward is to let reality have its say. I'm interested in the sense that, while, on the one hand, all fine art in our day is forced into a position of arbitrariness (anything can be art), on the other hand there is a kind of necessity which drives creativity at the subjective level. While the core of my practice is painting, artist's books and small constructions also form parts of my practice.