Matthew Wilson

Dreamhouse (2021)

Matthew Wilson is an artist living and working in Northern Ireland. A recent graduate of Belfast School of Art, he has previously been included in exhibitions such as the 250th Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition 2018, London and the 138th Royal Ulster Academy of Arts Exhibition 2019, Belfast. In 2019, he was granted a scholarship to attend the New York Academy of Art Summer Residency. He has worked on a number of commissioned projects with institutions such as Ulster University and Queens University Belfast and within the local community. Following his graduation, he was appointed Artist in Residence for Fine Art Sculpture/Lens at the Belfast School of Art for the 2020-2021 academic year.

Intimately surveying the terrain of memory; navigating what to say and what to leave unsaid, Wilson’s work maps place, landscape and material. Works come to fruition through a variety of traditional and unconventional approaches, most commonly in the form of sculptural installation, drawing, performance and writing. Wilson gently renders experience and place into the visual whilst navigating his own relationship to a sense of belonging. Conversations between past, present and future are addressed within the work, drawing upon the materiality of his rural farm homeland. Transformative processes are central to the work’s production, often utilising recovered objects and materials in an anachronistic manner to allude to domestic space. The works appear to linger between, their materiality a physical manifestation of a history in transition.

Stemming from personal narrative to speak of collective experience, Dreamhouse takes the culturally familiar form of a dollhouse. The physical process behind the work plays a key role in its inception. In this case, the piece is constructed from metal salvaged by the artist which was then manipulated through burning to achieve the finished surface. Like many of the artist’s works, the piece is outwardly minimal, viewers are drawn in by visual cues which subtly open other lines of association.