Edgeland Visions II by Matt James Healy

About

Over the past 10 to 15 years, there has been a renaissance in the folk horror and urban wyrd genres. The latter of which resonates particularly with Matt’s paintings. Folk horror draws on three pillars of ‘isolation’, ‘perversion of social norms’ and ‘invocation’. While urban wyrd can be said to be its metropolitan cousin, where the strange and otherworldly can be found just beneath the surface of city life. 

The series of paintings on display come from time spent by Matt in Lea Valley Park, north of London, from 2012-2016. During his exploration of the park, the landmarks and their surroundings became transformed through his emergence in them. Pylons became the mythic giants of Albion. Man-made chalk pits became lakes of fire in the dying light of day. The sun, moon and stars sat in the bows of overhead cables like notes on the staff lines of sheet music. 

The works are made using found panels of wood that have been foraged from industrial ‘edgelands’. Paint and wood stain are applied with a distinctly ‘heraldic’ style. Forms are largely geometric, the palate is nocturnal. But the result isn’t graphic or stylistic. Movement is visible; physicality and materiality give the works a primal vitality. 

The paintings read as markers of tribal territories or cult fetishes born out of a post-apocalyptic urban society. There is something deeply atavistic about the works; they speak of a reversion to something ancient or bestial. But they also feel current, as though signalling an imminent future. Or a nature in us all that exists just below the thin veneer of our genteel city lives. 

About Matt James Healy

Matt is a London-born artist, currently living and working in Folkstone. He studied at Bournemouth Arts Institute, graduating with a BA (hons) in 2006. Matt has exhibited extensively throughout the South Coast, including numerous solo exhibitions.