ALICE BLACK is proud to present Matthew Harris ‘A Table of Preparations’. Harris’ first solo exhibition at the gallery debuts a new body of work constructed in cloth and paper. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from an epigram coined by avant-garde composer John Cage to describe the instructions he gave on how to ‘prepare’ a piano to create indeterminate sound. Drawing inspiration from a “Cagean game of chance”, the show gives prominence to Harris’ ongoing explorations into the compositional possibilities that surface through anarchic spontaneity.
From the early 1940s, Cage experimented with strategically placing a variety of objects into the strings of a piano. Using a selection of everyday items - including nuts and bolts, screws, erasers, blocks of wood and strips of rubber, plastic and card - Cage set about transforming the sonic world of the instrument. The once familiar voice of the piano would be transformed into an intensely colourful and sometimes riotous palette of sound. The idea of the ‘Prepared Piano’ as a visual idea has preoccupied Harris for many years, ever since seeing one prepared for a concert of Cage’s music at the Cheltenham Music Festival. A group of familiar and unfamiliar shapes being trapped and held within the vertical structuring of piano wires has similitudes with Harris’ way of holding images in place with lines of wrapped thread, or layers of cloth bound together through vertical pleating.
Work in this exhibition originated from a series of shapes collected over time, both physically and photographically. More often than not discovered on the floor, the random and mundane objects squashed and pressed into pavements and road surfaces that catch Harris’ eye form one of the consistent starting points for his work. Through adopting procedures that utilise games of chance and indeterminacy, these found shapes are played with and actively explored, broken down and reconfigured, forming new unexpected shapes and configurations. These methodologies of chance include rolling dice, tossing stencils in a frisbee motion, and following a predetermined formula correlating numbers to actions. Working within the parameters of these systems allows Harris enormous freedom.
All of 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.
The resulting fragments and scraps of image, whether in paper or cloth, are simultaneously complete and incomplete in themselves, as if torn from a much larger whole. They are images temporarily bound, held still for the present whilst retaining their infinite potential for change.
Notes to Editors:
Harris was born in Kent and now lives and works in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Harris received his BA from Goldsmiths College of Art (1984-7). He has exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, the US and Japan and is featured in prominent public collections including The Whitworth Museum and Art Gallery (UK), the Crafts Council Collection (UK), and the International Quilt Museum, Nebraska (USA). Harris’ practice also perforates the music realm, having collaborated in 2014 with British Composer Howard Skempton and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group on ‘Field Notes’, a UK concert tour.
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