Textile artist Matthew Harris lets a roll of the dice dictate his artistic choices. We spoke to Matthew about his unique creative process, the interplay between paper and textile, and the roles that improvisation and chance play in his art practice.
Have you ever looked at a piece of art and felt drawn to its story, not just by what's on the surface, but by the layers of texture, rhythm, and emotion it holds? It’s almost as though the artist’s hands have woven their thoughts and feelings into every stitch, cut, and mark.
Matthew Harris’ work captures this essence. His journey into textiles began 26 years ago after predominantly working with paper and drawing. An established and competent artist, Matthew’s mesmerising textile works challenge conventional boundaries and celebrate the beauty of imperfection. They blend a rich variety of influences, from music to the meditative act of constructing and deconstructing cloth.
Artistic Beginnings
During our interview Matthew reflected on his unconventional upbringing, sharing, "I grew up with four parents, who were all practicing Buddhists, which I think did have a profound effect on my way of thinking about things.”
Matthew found and enrolled in Goldsmith’s course, which played a significant part in shaping the way he looks at materials and approaches work.
“I was always making things and interested in visual things. I sort of struggled in school. But once I got to a foundation course I had a very good relationship with a textile tutor in the workshop, Claire Boyd, who was instrumental I think, in encouraging a level of experimentation that excited me." Matthew reflects that Claire’s approach, her restless imagination and constant ‘what if’ questions, shaped his own thoughts about the process of working.
"I had a clear sense of what I wanted to do. A clear sense that I wanted to work independently as an artist and not as a design student,” he explains.
From Paper to Cloth
Matthew started his career making complex drawings, exploring mythology and storytelling, and he even worked in animation and design for a brief period of time.
His paper-based works began to evolve as he explored elements of patterns, repetition, and mismatch. At first, he actually had no intention of working with cloth.
"I started to make drawings from textiles, looking at elements of pattern and repetition. And I was really interested in that, and very simply, kind of marking a surface with my fingers and dribbling paint down and then blocking out.
I was making these drawings, and quite content to make those drawings and just to leave them for what they were, and then I happened across a piece of cloth in London, which was a Moroccan henna cloth. Which really excited me. It was a woven cloth, a mixture of wool and cotton that was painted with henna. It had been embroidered and on the back patched and darned. And then literally a few weeks later I came across a piece of Kuba cloth. I had never seen Kuba cloth before. And these two things really made me feel that I wanted to take the drawings into fabric in some kind of way."
Matthew’s foray into fabric started when he picked up a builder’s dust sheet from the corner of his studio and decided to translate his practices with paper into textiles.
"I had very clear ideas. I wanted the fabric to have a very particular weight. Because I was working with these repeated shapes I wanted to be able to find a way to repeat shapes across the surface in a sort of unplanned way. So I kind of came up with this idea that I might pleat the cloth in order to compress the layers together, and cut into the cloth, and then fold it down so that whole shapes might be made where the edges touched."
That moment was it for Matthew... "I have a really strong memory of sitting in front of this board on the floor, putting this color onto this cloth, and thinking, 'Oh, I think I've found, yeah, this will do.' and I've used those materials ever since."
And Matthew still loves a builder’s dust sheet, saying it takes colour beautifully and he can play around with it. “It's dense, but it's actually, relatively easy to stitch through."
Chance in Art
For Matthew, he feels he is not designing the pieces, but instead they come about through the process of making.
This leads to where chance plays a role in Matthew’s art practice. Where the roll of a dice impacts the artistic choices in his pieces.
“I would say I've been working with chance, with chance procedures, for quite a long time, in various ways. But more specifically, over the last couple of years, in the Table of Preparations work. So because of my interest in chance operations, I started to just throw stencils randomly, first across the paper and then later across cloth, scaling up the size of the stencils."
"Then, I started to use dice to determine how many times I might use each shape and what I might draw or paint around the shape with, whether I use a thick brush or a thin brush or a medium brush. Whether it should be a plane just a line, or whether it should be a strike, or whether it should be solid and textured."
Matthew was influenced by the works of musician and artist John Cage. "I love Cages' music and his printmaking, and whole philosophical approach to making work. I suppose I just went with that, because of this whole thing of wanting to be surprised all the time, and a bit scared by what's in front of me. So sometimes the cloth has hardly anything on it. I might throw the dice and it's just two of one shape, one of another. And I've got all this all this space, which is really scary. And other times there's just masses of it, and other times there are lots of shapes that actually I don't like. But I know that the process would allow for all of those shapes to change."
While he knows everything is open to change, “But invariably, all those things that I fear, you know, they turn out alright. Those shapes become really interesting shapes or they just become a line that I can use elsewhere to make another shape interesting. It just frees everything up for me. I'm not having to make decisions. And I don't want to make esthetic decisions about 'does that look nice there', or 'would it look better over there?' In the way that when you come across stuff in nature, or you come across a wall that's had old billboards stuck to it and bits of paint, you don't angst over the composition. You accept it for what it is. Cage had this phrase, it is what it is."
Teaching a Visual Language
Matthew has worked on a range of exciting projects and also teaches art to others.
“My approach to teaching is a culmination of the experience that I had at Goldsmiths,” he explains.
Teaching art foundation courses, Matthew has instructed jewellers, sculptors, graphic designers, and photographers. "I always wanted to find a way in which they could kind of find textile materials and see them as being potentially useful in whatever discipline they wanted to work in," he shares.
For anyone who wants to develop their own visual language, Matthew emphasises the importance of immersing yourself in what interests you and also starting with drawing. “Immerse yourself a bit more in the stuff that really interests you. All the projects that I do begin with some form of drawing. And for a lot of people who love working in textiles, you see the blood drain from their face when you say we're going to do some drawing. But if you think drawing in the broadest sense, it's really useful as a way of immersing yourself."
“Different people want different things from their creative work, but if you want your work to have more meaning and be something that excites you, it’s about understanding what makes you tick and how you can start to shape them, play with that language and create something that’s personal to you.”
"99.9% of the time people are always surprised about what they produce, the process and themselves.”
About the Artist
Matthew Harris, a graduate of the textile course at Goldsmiths College in the UK, has been working with textiles since 2000. His work has been shown in a number of group and solo exhibitions throughout the UK, Ireland, and Japan.
Matthew creates artwork that involves dying, cutting, and hand stitching, focusing mainly on abstract imagery and translating drawn marks into cloth. Making works that are pieced, patched, and assembled, helps Matthew reach his aim to create pieces that explore repetition, pattern, and the disrupted or dissonant journey of line and image across and through the surface of cloth.
Watch the Friday Feature Artist interview below for more valuable insights on Matthew's influences, inspiration, and unique creative process.
