Matthew Conduit
CHORA
Edition of 200
A limited edition book, 300mm x 210mm, featuring the recent work of Matthew Conduit all made around his home city of Sheffield, comprising of 46 colour plates bound in recycled board with stamped and foil title.
Matthew Conduit’s imposing images have a quality of permanence and of powerful materiality. Whether the lens captures the immemorial stone of Wirksworth’ impressive quarries or the profuse wildlife of untamed woodlands in a more familiar England, Conduit translates the overwhelming visible stimuli that surround us, through a photographic production that is both realistic and intensely conceptual. Whereas the horizontal composition of the images asserts the stability and compactness of the real, the acute awareness of colours, lines and variations within the frame realise an enticingly sensuous abstraction. Therefore, Conduit’s approach to specifically human imprints is more inclusive than actually dominant. In the artist’s generous and encompassing vision of the physical density that surrounds us, the presence of human beings is made manifest only through the account of disseminated traces and time-swept relics, bold and monumental yet fragile as the intricate flora that bursts from the mesmerizing tableaux of his Chora series.
Violette Alfonsi, 2012
Chora: an ancient Greek term that often takes on the general meaning of the countryside surrounding the city
