Matthew Harris was born in 1966 in Kent and now lives and works in Stroud, Gloucestershire. He studied at The Hereford School of Art (1982-4) and Goldsmiths College of Art (1984-7). Harris has exhibited widely throughout the U.K, Europe, the United States and Japan. His work is featured in public collections including the Crafts Council Collection, The Whitworth Museum and Art Gallery (UK) and the International Quilt Museum, Nebraska (U.S.A). In 2010 he was shortlisted for the first Arts Foundation Award for Textile Art and in 2009 completed ‘Scorched’ a ten metre long Graphic Score for the refurbished Bristol Beacon Concert Hall, Bristol. In 2014 he collaborated with the British composer Howard Skempton and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group on ‘Field Notes’, an Arts Council funded, U.K concert tour.

Matthew Harris makes abstract works in paper and cloth, which oscillate with colour, texture and rhythm. In his hands, the process of painting and textile art become inextricable. Harris’ work utilises a process of deliberate tension; continuous expansion and contraction, action and reaction, a process whereby layers of image form strata of embedded material, ‘seeded with potentiality’. Cloth pieces are constructed from layers of painted cotton twill and Muslin. The paper pieces are made from layers of Japanese mulberry paper painted with ink, acrylic paint, oil pastel, oil stick and beeswax. Both cloth and paper are bound together with a waxed linen thread. As Harris cuts through the material, shapes appear and lines, areas of colour and texture are exposed and a playful movement begins. Excavating down through the layers, scraps and fragments of image reveal themselves. Some elements are kept and left where they are; others are moved; some are unearthed and then buried again. Flowing with the material itself, Harris responds quickly at times and more slowly at others until eventually a composition begins to emerge.

In much the same way improvisation in jazz interpolates from the theme of a standard tune, elements of the original shape remain in Harris’ works but often they are only glimpsed or echoed as fragments within the new. The process by which Harris creates and constructs images through an alternating rhythm of paper and cloth, paint and thread, has become a ritual of making and unmaking developed over many years. Working the material is at the heart of his meditative ritual; not just the physical material of fabrics but the material stuff of an image. Ultimately, this process allows for infinite possibility and variation explored within the confines of the original materiality. More often than not Harris makes pieces in series of three or more, all of which have their starting point in the same image; varied reimaginings of what had been.