matthew james kay

A&C: In your sculptural work you use old and weathered materials, is it because these materials have a certain pathos about them ?

MJK: Definitely, I choose materials that I am inspired by on an emotional level or that I sense have potential to support a range of feelings. I like to use materials that already exist as objects, like items of furniture or utensils rather than sections of wood. Because they are familiar objects, items of furniture are readily identified with by a viewer, and when these objects show signs of wear they take on greater emotional value. Wear suggests a history for the object, a life and a journey and a sense of tragedy. I would hope that the evidence of the objects' histories within the work make it easier for people to connect with the work on a deeper level than appreciating aesthetic value.

More than this though, my choice of objects is important for the communication of the ideas I try to put across. My work has a lot to do with the coexistence and codependence of opposites: wholeness and brokenness, doubt and faith, sadness and joy - and for such a dialogue to work within the artwork there need to be signifiers of both. I like to start with an object that has been thrown out, or whose owner decided it had served its purpose and build onto it a sense of hope. In much spiritual writing things ultimately end up greater than they begin, so the journey is always from sadness to joy, brokenness to wholeness and it's this hope that I try to indicate through the process of making my work.

A&C: It often seems like you want your artworks to have anthropomorphic qualities, why is this?

MJK: I rarely start out with the intention that a piece will look like a person, but when I come to decide that it's finished it has become as anthropomorphic as it can possibly be without being an actual statue! Sometimes my work is about a specific person, works like "the Folk Society President" and "the Likelihood of a Collision on the Way" in which the component parts related directly to what that person meant to me/how I perceived them and the situations that they faced - of all my work, these are the sculptures that look least like people. My work is also quite autobiographical so some works take on the role of an alter ego and I might name them after a historical/mythological figure that relates in some way to my situation at the time of making the work.

At the heart of my practice is a belief in God which, hard as I try I can't seem to shake; this raises a number of problems and unanswerable questions. It affects the way that I look at the world and the way that I think about myself and others, throwing up a host of doubts and dilemmas. The existence or not of God has implications which dramatically affect the way we view life, who we are, and why we do what we do. I think it's typically human to seek and find value in something beyond ourselves, be that art, music, love, sport, god; it's a universal quest and being peculiar to humanity I find it best engaged with through human narratives. For me grappling with the idea of God and how that relates to the everyday is most effectively explored in work that has human characteristics, concerns people, or has some kind of narrative.

A&C: Chairs feature heavily in your work, is it their relation to the human body which makes them good fodder for artworks?

MJK: In a way, yes. I am drawn to those objects which hold the potential to communicate meaning or emotion of human significance and chairs take on the necessary anthropomorphic qualities without much effort; I guess they're a bit of a quick fix, but their role in human life gives them great depth of character. A battered chair is somehow more tragic than a discarded table or cupboard. Because they are used to support us through a variety of activities this makes them more that just a tool, and their shape being the negative space where a body could be, is readily evocative of a human being. I find the best objects for my sculptures are those that can hold more than one layer of meaning and chairs can hold a great sense of loss, of absence but also potential - for me a chair is a signifier of intimacy, comfort and compassion. I think this may be why chairs have been used/depicted so much in art historically.

A&C: Your work seems to have a similar aesthetic to German artists like Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer, what is your relationship with these artists, if any?

MJK: I've always loved their work so I'm glad you recognise it in my own - it's funny that I've never made a concious decision to make work with a similar aesthetic to theirs. I have always found encouragement in Beuys's vitrines, in their simplicity and unpolished presentation. His mysterious arrangements of objects that appear to hold some symbolic value for the artist but are baffling to the viewer. I see elements of that in my own practice, using objects, materials and words recurrently because of the feelings that they invoke for me or the meanings that I can attach to them - so chairs become signifiers of intimacy and soil of sadness, or objects may have some connection in my mind with a specific person. I love the idea of Beuys as a shamanistic artist and the notion that he in some way creates work with a sacramental, spiritual dimension that goes beyond the materials and compositions and it's that which makes it art, it's an idea that I relate to quite strongly, as taboo as it may be, and is something that I see in much of my work. I would add however that my work has been influenced more directly by people like Tom Friedman, Keith Wilson and Doris Salcedo alongside a cocktail of values and theories from the Dada and Arte Povera movements.

A&C: The titles of your work are usually obscure sentences or references that people might not get, do you mind that people might not understand the references?

MJK: I would like people to understand the sentiment behind the titles but I don't mind if they go over some people's heads. I enjoy playing with the words as part of the work, using titles that contribute to the meaning rather than simply describing the object. I like that my titles add to the mystery - a person may have decided upon their personal interpretation of the work, only to be faced with a title that suggests that there's more than they could fathom. The titles themselves generally come from songs that I've written and are often influenced by some kind of religious mythology; most of my ideas for songs come from flashes of inspiration when I'm reading the bible or the Koran. I think this process of finding names gives the words meaning in themselves setting them on a par with the physical components of the work. In a similar way that knowing what a person's name means gives you a new angle from which to consider them, I like to think that my sculptures take on new possibilities of meaning with the titles that I give them. The work may be more readily deciphered by people who are familiar with my music so I have made the Songs Without Names EP downloadable from my web-site. (click here to go to the music download page).

A&C: How does your sculptural work relate to your book making work?

MJK: I'm at quite an early stage of bringing book-making into my practice. I learnt it as a craft at university and struggled then to include it in the work that I was making. A few years on, I am now considering the connection between the books and sculptures to be similar to the sculptures' relationship to my music; the books are a way for me to explore ideas with words in a fairly abstract way - particularly with the collaged diagram poems I've been producing recently - that then influences the meaning of my sculptures. Sometimes I like to think of my practice as producing one colossal cypher in which different aspects lock and un-lock each other, and which will only ever make complete sense if you could view every part at once, but of which, through combined elements, I can give glimpses of meaning. Often the books are sculptures in their own right whilst other publications are little more than an aside and a chance to practice drawing and story telling; it's definitely the most varied and eclectic area of my practice.