MATT SIMMONS

New Work

2012-01-22T21:03:00.002Z

I intend to update this blog a bit more often now i've got my website up and running. Been pretty busy recently with Bristol Diving School and haven't had as much time for my own work. Being interested in space and urban environment and having just moved to a new city it seemed natural to focus on this as a subject or starting point (I did some more personal work on my room but i won't be posting that here). The following images are taken between midnight and 4am, i don't see them as finished, just a way of visually recording a new environment or a personal remapping of an unfamiliar city. I'll probably focus on this wandering as a means of encountering subject matter for a bit and see how it turns out. I've got a few more things planned with these images which i'll post when i get round to carrying them out. Overwhelming focus on fences?

Latest edits

2011-05-08T05:00:00.000+01:00

Spent another few hours creating some more montages today. These ones are perhaps less abstract in that they relate more obviously to the plans. The worry was that the previous images were too abstract and didn't use recognizable features of a typical blueprint. Feedback appreciated.

Third year project

2011-05-06T06:14:00.000+01:00

Here are a few images from my final year project. A brief artist statement can be read below.

This body of work explores the concept of the utopian as an unattainable vision. Taking a local shopping centre as its subject, the project uses montage to bring together archival type imagery with architectural drawings. The images of the building become disrupted; squashed into impossible shapes and broken up by the lines of its envisioning. Although only examining one building, the work considers civil architecture as a whole, highlighting the impossibility of fabricating the utopian city centres we see proposed in our society. The many translations a building undergoes to reach its final completion means that it will inevitably fall short of its idealised conception. This translation is continued by time, as architecture is inevitably re-contextualised within the urban landscape.