“To move is to live, to express oneself is to endure”
—Fernando Pessoa
Matthew Edmond Watkins is best known for his site-specific, impermanent installations made of hand-made, unfired mudbricks. His work is often associated with the arte povera movement because of his use of non-traditional materials, yet Matthew refers to his work as “preindustrial minimalism”, a term coined by Bosco Sodi as a formal reference to minimalism without the conceptual association because of the emphasis on natural materials. After receiving his BFA in sculpture from Union University in 2019, Matthew won an internship at Franconia Sculpture Park where he built the large-scale installation “The Best Laid Schemes” using mudbricks made from clay found on site. From there, he attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for a post-baccalaureate position where he developed his body of work of non-objective paintings made from natural materials. Amidst the hysteria of the lockdowns and pandemic, Matthew completed “Dust As Dust As Dust”, an installation at the Western North Carolina Sculpture Center, in the fall of 2020 for permanent display. Since then, he has been continuing the production of his paintings while experimenting with carved materials such as wood and stone while living in Asheville, NC. Using traditional rabbit-skin glue as a binding agent, his paintings are made using natural pigments of dirt, clay, charcoal and chalk in a minimal, non-objective style. Some of these paintings were displayed during the winter of 2022 at The Marquee in the River Arts District in Asheville.
Through his creative endeavors since attending Union University, Matthew has gravitated toward the field of architecture, spending much of his time drafting, rendering, and studying to prepare himself for a graduate degree in architecture in the near future. Since May of 2022, he has been a work intern at Vellum Architecture and Design in Asheville where he primarily makes scaled maquettes for the projects and proposals while absorbing everything he can from the firm’s talented architects and designers.
Artist Statement
I make in spite of the eternal flux of the world around me. The desire for permanence and a consistency in the face of the brevity and ever-changing nature of life is an innate human trait. Through my work I am making something of permanence of the present moment, something on which to grasp hold. My process is a result of my need to last, my need to create something that will go beyond myself, yet with my sculptural installations, I purposefully subvert that narrative by participating in an excessively laborious process to create a piece that will merely be eroded away with time. My response to the absurdity of this human experience is an absurd action.
These themes of Time, fragility, and absurdity are a constant in all that I do. The use of natural materials in my practice is purposeful in this regard. The treatment of the clay, charcoal, chalk, wood, or stone function to bridge the gap between these intangible realities to bring them to the human-scale on an individual level. My physical involvement with these materials connects me not only to these themes in tangible terms but also to the natural process of the environment that we inhabit. I do not view myself nor what I’m doing as separate from these processes; it is merely the reshaping of material with my own hands.