Mathew Merrick

Throughout the lecture Matthew Merrick didn’t really talk or explain his work too much, which lead to me researching and looking at his website and honestly I’m not a big fan of his art work, which was annoying because I thought the lecture was actually quite interesting and useful, a lot of what Matthew spoke about was his inspirations and the way in which his practice works.

Merrick explained how he didn’t have a studio anymore, which led him to begin making work in conventional places such as his train journeys. His practice becoming more dynamic allowed him to think of his work in new ways and with new approaches. In my practice I feel that having a studio is so important I barely ever work at home the studios are literally my 2^nd home but I feel like this can have a negative impact on my work in times I can’t access the studios etc. I find it really interesting that Mathew made this change to his practice and this ended up leading him down completely new approaches to his work and although I don’t think this would work in my practice I think it might be useful to try making work in more conventional places and seeing if it pushes my work further or whether this process simply doesn’t work for me.

Matthew showed a couple of his sound pieces throughout the lecture such as ‘Badumbadum’ which was a direct response to being on a train, but I was more interested in the performance pieces he briefly mentioned. Matthew had made some performance piece with himself that weren’t documented at all and he explained how useful these where in his practice. At the moment iv been working on a couple of different performance pieces, some of which I was thinking of performing to myself and I couldn’t decide whether to record these or not. The thought of documenting work has always been a little bit of a weird concept to me, there are so many works Iv done and forgot to make any documentation of it, completely by accident, but more and more recently I have been thinking about whether perhaps I had done this subconsciously for a reason and whether I should make work with the purpose to not document it all. Whether this idea of not documenting it on purpose being an importance to the work would have some kind of effect on the work or my practice.

Honestly, I found this lecture so relatable on so many different levels.

Another point was when Matthew spoke about him realising some changes in his practice as he found himself getting stuck on political ideas and art work that has the ability to change the world, but this isn’t to do with his practice and his work wasn’t even meant to be about that idea. Literally a few days before this lecture me and my friend Amelia had performed a rough idea of this idea we had for a performance installation and we got a lot of useful feedback. Some of which was negative feedback as some people explained how it was obviously political and how they personally didn’t like political art work or practices and honestly before that day I didn’t really think of my work as political I was just making these things because of the idea that came and I never considered my practice as political, but looking back a lot of my work is actually deeply political I just didn’t really pay attention to this before. Coming to this new realisations about my practice being political, honestly took me back a bit and It made me start thinking about my practice differently and how to not be pushy or I guess what some people might call too political. Mathew addressing these issues in his own practice made me feel a lot better about these ideas and not think to deep into where I let the idea of not being ‘too political’ effect my practice.

Overall it was a really useful lecture, I related a lot to some of the things Mathew was discussing in his lecture, and he also kept saying super inspirational quotes throughout the lecture, such as “everyone is in their own lane” love it, thanks Mathew.