Head Lamp
a Collaborative exhibition - Alison Shaw and Wayne Matthews
2019 Aardklop festival
Briewe aan die nag - festival curator Johan Thom
Wayne Matthews and Alison Shaw, as professional fools and habitual inhabitants of the night, present; Head Lamp… a two person, mixed media confession of what we found there.
As light falls away to the horizons of the Western Lands and completes the checkerboard pattern of nights and days. We have peered, like you, into the furtive darkness and with all manner of spelling cast a net to bring back the pictures and the letters of the eye under strain. There’s nothing to guide the way but the hermit’s illuminating oil that extends what passes for clarity by day. Here we may tow our bark, barefaced and covered only by the night.
Soos die lig op die horison van die Westerse samelewing kwyn, voltooi dit die dambordpatroon wat nagte en dae bied. Ons het, net soos jy, ’n steelse kykie in die donkerte gewaag en wyer gekyk om die beelde en briewe/boodskappe van die oog wat onder spanning is, terug te roep.
“About losing your head to find your feet”
Headlamp is a two person exhibition of drawing, collage and mixed media artworks by Alison Shaw and Wayne Matthews. They offer the viewer little more than glimpses of time spent in the obscuring, furtive darkness. Together, in this exhibition, the small constellation of works embraces their uncertain relation to one another, they share no singular intent and there is no arch-narrative that binds the images and objects, only traces of a shared sensibility. Headlamp images a vision of the half-formed, partial and fragmentary; a world of apparition and dispersion, creation and dissolution, of life in ‘the flicker’.
Images and materials are arrested, somewhere along the path of their construction, deterioration and destruction. Foxed paper, unidentifiable fragments of word and image reconfigured, alluvial deposits of graphite, paper pitted and torn, phonemes, palindromes, Eros and Hermes and the archetypal forests; they all exist in a world that lacks fixity. Rather than clear statement they opt to insinuate and implicate content, often found, often unintended but accepted none the less. It seems that through the adoption of the results of chance and accident the works develop a language unto themselves.
There is an iconography here, developed behind the divergence of style, register and technical approach, often involving ‘them’ implicitly as components of the subject matter itself. There is a shared compulsiveness, a haphazard reaching, of mounding materials, of swelling deposits, traces and compulsive marking all loosely framing a fragmentary glimpse into a space defined by uncertainty, experiment and curiosity. The works and the exhibition is a gesture in reverence of the ‘Night’ as a metaphor for the creative process, of forever reaching into the indeterminate.