ALUMNI STORIES - MATTHEW WATKINS

2019 ALUM / MATTHEW WATKINS IS COMPOSING A SCULPTURE FOR THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA. THE PROJECT WILL BE FINISHED ON NOV. 1ST OF 2020.

HERE ARE HIS THOUGHTS …

The location is on the trail through the woods at the Western North Carolina Sculpture Center in Lenoir, NC. The title is still in the works (I’ll settle on the title once the piece is complete)The piece itself is done entirely by myself: from the digging of the clay, the mixing, the making of the bricks, and now the laying of the brick.

It’ll consist of around 250 mudbricks (measuring 6x6x12in and 6x6x21in) and stand at about 10ft tall with a footprint measuring 54x20in.Similar to the project that I did at Franconia in Minnesota, the piece is meant to erode and wear away over time. It speaks to the futility of human labor/toil, and the inability of humans (especially myself as an individual) to make a permanent mark on this earth.I’ve begun to think about these mud brick structures as “anti-monoliths”, especially this current piece. What this form will be is a monolith, yet it’s not like what we think about when we think about a these forms. It flies in the face of what humans have traditionally erected monoliths for. A monolith was usually a solid block of stone erected on end to stand for potentially thousands of years, yet this piece will be lucky to stand for more than half a century at best given that it’s made from raw mud bricks. I’ve started to consider myself as a preindustrial-minimalist, which is a term coined by artist Bosco Sodi, because I don’t align myself with the modernists/minimalists of the 20th century given their conceptual foundation. However, my work is very formalist and minimal when it comes to form. The process itself is of utmost importance to me, and unlike the land artists of the 60s and 70s, I don’t like to use industrial machinery to create my work. I feel an overwhelming need for my body to be involved in the material and the process.