Interview with Matthew Smith
Matthew Smith: It’s basically three sculptural pieces that are models of lakes of the Lake District, made as the kind of pre-cast black pond-liners that you would buy in a garden centre; and they’re filled with water, have fish and aquatic plants in them, like a normal pond; the only difference being that they’re not buried in the ground, but just free-standing objects within the space.
BLOC: What spurs your interest in the landscape, or more specifically the English Lake District in this work?
MS: For a start the Lake District is the sort of place that I spent a fair bit of time in, and I’m interested in our human relation to landscape, the picturesque and stuff like that. It’s trying to combine the domestic aesthetic of the garden with a sort of grand picturesque aesthetic of landscape; I’m interested in how in that sort of landscape, it’s a very particular type of experience that you’re having, and it always seems to be arranged visually. The Lakes, in particular, are meant to be one of the wildest kinds of landscape you can get (in this country anyway – which is not very wild at all really, but kind of what they mean in peoples’ heads anyway), and that to make that experience of the landscape authentic enough for you, you have to go to great lengths. Even when you go there you sort of turn up in a car at a certain place and then you have to forget the fact that you’ve driven there and sort of turn away from the road, forget the litter on the floor, or whatever other signs of human inhabitation there might be. I’m sort of interested in a wildness versus an aesthetic of nature which uses nature to again make something visually arranged – that, that people do in their gardens. I just think that they’re not necessarily too dissimilar things, those environments.
BLOC: So, do you think this is something quite specific to British culture?
MS: I suspect it is, but being British I only have it from that perspective… I don’t know… well I’ve been to the States and it’s a definitely a very different relationship to wilderness and landscape in places where that kind of wilderness is actually life-threateningly dangerous…
BLOC: Also, in somewhere like Scandinavia, where their culture allows you to go out and camp where you like. That must bring a different kind of orientation to the environment.
MS: Yes, it’s very organised in this country, the whole experience is very mediated though, but I suppose that’s to do with space, because there’s not a lot of space in this country.
BLOC: You have spoken about the common elements shared by the garden and national parks. What ties together, in your mind, the gallery space, with your work in it, to these landscapes?
MS: It’s to do with the fact that both experiences of those places are definitely arranged visually; in the same way that when your in the gallery you’re looking at the work and it’s artificial – with the gallery being a particularly artificial space, a sort of stick-out-of-reality, white cube space – combined with the way in which we arrange ourselves in terms of the landscape visually. There are viewpoints that are marked on maps, which have a little symbol, and when you go there, well that’s the view that you’re supposed to consume. And there’s also scenic drives that are signposted, that tell you that you should… if you’re going from A to B then you can go the scenic way if you go this way; and then you’re experiencing something through a window in the car. I think the garden works that way but it’s more creative or closer to an artwork because it’s complete human artifice, and it can be really exciting in a way because you’re ordering living things to your own visual system. It doesn’t just extend to what you plant or how it’s arranged. It’s a fact that there’s a classification of birds that is ‘Garden Birds’ – they just happened to visit this place, but because it’s a visual place they get classified and subsumed into that visual system. If we go back to the work, the ponds, and the fish, even though they’re there as their own life-form, they’re there as an ornament.
BLOC: There’s something fascinating about the fish in particular, the way you can kind of order the rest of the work in your head as ornament, but…
MS: Yes, but it’s kind of going too far…
BLOC: …but the fish have they’re own little micro-environment, and they’re there hidden away under the leaves.
MS: This is the thing, that as much as you create this thing and everything is within your own visual system, nature’s not going to stop doing whatever it is that it does. They’re going to take advantage of whatever way it is. So it might not be working in a way that you want it to work (or rats might be hiding under your patio), nature just moves into whatever space; they just invade every possible space – and there’s no value judgement, it’s just potential habitat or territory. I quite like the way that, particularly birds, can join a row of gardens together into a territory, so you have a row of terraces that all have back gardens, and that whole back garden is sort of its own little park in a way, but divided by walls, and each has its own thing going on in it.
BLOC: And wild birds and animal will use gardens and parks as corridors into the towns and cities.
MS: In a similar way nature uses railway sidings and motorway verges; particularly seeds from plants – they can travel along motorways very quickly, because cars going past will blow them.
The way that particular environments are valued by humans seems to be all about the visual, even though that nowadays there’s a lot of talk about biodiversity – it’s just talk really – it seems as though the most valued things are visual things. For instance you can have this designation between greenfield sites and brownfield sites, and the difference between those is that one is visually appealing and one isn’t. As a rule brownfield sites are more biodiverse because they’re not managed by humans. So the debate is all a bit skewed, and that’s probably a very human characteristic; as it a very visual thing. I have a bit of a fascination with that I guess.
BLOC: Well there’s plenty of brownfield sites fast appearing round here… How do you feel about showing in Bloc, in particular in such an urban environment? Have you shown work in rural contexts?
MS: Not really, no. I’ve always lived in urban environments – well since I’ve been practicing anyway – so there’s this thing of being interested in something that’s somewhere else.
BLOC: Have you been making work about the landscape for a few years then? Do you know what it was that initially attracted you?
MS: I think it was the search for something that was real or authentic, in the same way that I was just talking about people going away to the Lake District, wanting to travel there and have a wild and authentic experience. Maybe that was the trigger for me, trying to find something, a subject matter, that was sort of real – that sounds ridiculous – particularly round here there’s countryside or places where people go to walk. Even the most innocuous looking places could often turn out to have been old pits or slag heaps that have now been covered with earth. So where do you draw the line? Where do you say this is artifice or this is natural? There’s no line….
BLOC: I know that in the Peak district farmers are given grants to manage their land and preserve this idealised look of the countryside.
MS: And that’s alright. I don’t want to have some kind of value judgement on this; it’s all interesting. In a way its more interesting that it is all artifice… maybe you could be more creative with it and less precious? If that’s what it is, basically a preserved museum, and if people acknowledged that, then maybe you could do some completely ridiculous or amazing things in nature – but people wouldn’t let you. Logically it should go in one direction, but I think humans are very nostalgic creatures hankering after some idealised way of living that we think there used to be, but actually we always been this unhappy.
