Materia Prima: The Rough Guide to a Soft Apocalypse

Materia prima -  First matter - is the inchoate substance required for alchemy, a material to be transformed. Akin to chaos or dark matter  - the nastier, stickier and more base this material is, the better. My materia prima is the medium of paint; metamorphosis occurs through the plasticity of the medium.

These works use viscous pigment to record a play of energies in continuous interaction. Shapes coalesce, congeal and disperse to depict vectors of vitality rather than vistas. This is no longer the logic of mimesis, it is the lateral momentum of latency -  of the potential to invent forms. These paintings might serve as alternative maps for worlds in flux that assert our connection to the physicality of substances and to the world around us.

We are flawed bodies in space, but our minds, like paint, are plastic. Painting asserts the importance of materiality as an antidote to the screen. Paint’s viscosity is used here as analogue for a resistance to the liquefaction of the body, to the immateriality of the digital.

Megan Walch