Mind In Matter

Zimbabwe-born sculptor Michele Mathison’s work interrogates the ongoing social and environmental impacts of technology’s grip on the planet.

- Alexandra Dodd

Speaking to Michele Mathison, it quickly becomes evident that he is a sculptor’s sculptor, an artist immersed in the fundamental weight, substance and texture of the world. ‘My work is deeply influenced by the materials I use,’ he says from his studio in Denver, southeast of Johannesburg, where he is ‘exploring, researching, making maquettes’ toward a new body of sculptures that builds on States of Emergence, his 2017 solo show at Whatiftheworld Gallery.

But it is not just the essence locked into wood or stone or metal that he is trying to set free. Mathison is driven as much by the contemporary conceptual freight of his forgings as by the fundamental life of his raw materials. The works on States of Emergence, for example, began their lives as pieces of rock destined for reconstruction into everyday objects – counters, gravestones, pavements – but were transformed into artworks that invite reflection on their materiality and on what stone sculpture means in a commoditised world.

Born in Zimbabwe and based in Joburg, Mathison has a familiar no-nonsense, feet-on-the-scorched earth quality about him. His work speaks in a grammar that is concise and hewn. Powerfully invoking the regional turbulence and forced migration of recent decades, it traffics in currencies of value, exchange and movement, of resource extraction and material transmogrification.