Bundanon

Matt O’Brien is a multi-disciplinary artist working on Bundjalung country in the northern rivers region of NSW.

His experimentation with drawings, paintings and technology enable him to examine new ways of responding to the Australian landscape. Framed by the grand narratives of the artists encounters with the epic Australian ‘landscape’, Matt’s work contributes a simulacrum of this, rather focussing on how the connection to past present and future dialogs in making work can create intimate dialogues between the individual and country. This intimacy is felt across his paintings in which he interacts with the natural elements including the wind, earth, and grasses. Similarly his video work aims to provide a different experience from the margins to contribute to critical dialogs. His site-responsive process aims to connect artist, work, and country together.

In Residence at Bundanon

The proposed residency project aims to investigate the production of site responses by exploring various key interconnected processes. The research title, Suspension, is a summation for the project which is a reduction of theories and processes that underpin the entire project.

Primarily, research into the production of earth-based pigments, observational studies of the local environs, framing the context of the work in the current discourse of the Anthropocene and examining hidden dialogs of place will be undertaken. The introduction of AI and AR technologies will be introduced as a complimentary addition to the production of the work as providing a simulacrum of place participation and generating work in the studio by traditional means. The theories concerning territorialization and re-territorialization, the nomad, multidisciplinary approaches and current discourse on place and placement will inform the project, though by the very nature of these theories the project is open to nuances exposed when working actively inside the project as it progresses. Through a combination of research, field studies, and creative studio practice led inquiry, I intend to create a substantial body of work for future exhibition.