Mat Clum / Pippa Gatty

About

Mat Clum researches human consciousness - the way it interacts with the world while simultaneously informing it - to fuel his work in abstraction.  This group of paintings, Within the Wordless Universe, explores the interface where the subconscious meets the physical world and emerges as the individual.
Mat employs a rigorously formal, though minimally apparent, visual vocabulary to address the questions posed in this non-verbal space.  His lexicon functions not only to represent each piece’s underpinnings but to ask further questions that become apparent only as the piece evolves toward a future moment of (im)possible completion. The paintings in this series cannot be characterised as 'finished', offering specific answers to particular questions, but rather as 'beginnings', entrances to a continuing conversation that creates the narrative defining our reality.  Conversation demands dialogue, and these works, often diptych in format, signal the necessity of this dialogue, between the viewer and the painting as well as between the paintings themselves - to point towards that transitory, ephemeral ground where answers might lie. 
Mat was born in 1962 and raised in the United States. He graduated from the School of Art at the University of Michigan.  He lives and works in London.

Pippa Gatty's work is centred around a belief in the power of artistic labour and activity to generate a phantasm. Accordingly, her practice becomes a device for shifting time and space, either infiltrating a pre-existing archive or building her own register, in which to find a zone where memory and narrative can be created and altered.  She uses her medium as a way to understand and navigate through archival material. Her investigations, and process, together create a liminal space between the imaginary and the real, the known and the unknown, in which the acts of pretending and believing are addressed. Her recent work contributes to a wider personal archive of explorations, as well as reflecting her surrounding landscape. Drawing on a rich history of the sublime and a nostalgia for the golden age of romantic landscape, the paintings suggest an environmental foreboding, and a grief for both lost innocence and a vanished world. They are meditations on the human condition, our place within a changing world and the metaphysical possibilities available within this. The surface of each painting is heavily worked, having been repeatedly painted and repainted, before the final image reveals itself. The finished works represent both a series of melancholic excavations into a lost past and meditations on a potential future.
Pippa was born in London in 1965 and studied painting at Chelsea School of Art. She lives and works in Scotland.