Matthew Rawcliffe

Communicating Your Ideas! I have been thinking about this a lot, it feels very complex - it becomes all mashed together with beliefs about storytelling and art in general, a desire to feel something, a desire to express, to be together, to be slow, to be fast, to be gentle, to be wild and reckless, to listen and get lost in the details, to entertain simplicity, to offer minimalism as a way into the depths of our fantasies, to assert the right to make bad art, to tell incomplete stories, to make selfish work… All of these things. I am thinking about words and language - trying to make space for those who do not experience the world in a primarily linguistic mode. So for me, I am trying to communicate my ideas without words and to understand my ideas beyond words. One of the clearest ways I observe this being done is through sensory stories, and I have been trying to communicate and imagine my ideas as sensory stories - there are some really great resources that have guided me through th

  Hi everyone, I took an impulsive trip to London over the easter weekend, to see some friends, family and get inspired by some art!   Here is a little writing from some of the performances and exhibitions I visited: Thin Air are we making art for instagram? maybe we should be doing. probably we already are. are we reflected in art or seen in our vanities. are we building the most expansive and well-detailed archives through our capturing of absolutely everything. maybe we’re not really capturing anything. just smiling in front of things. dancing yoga on memorials. eating food that’s cold because we took so long filming it. maybe we’re living. maybe we only want to show what is pretty. maybe we dance in the flashing lights because we have become the protagonist. maybe this is the beauty of privilege in societies that become better at facilitating individualistic expression. i can’t decide if i’m distracted or fascinated by people. their boredom, their narcissism equally stimulates my e

  Just a short post about feeling lonely. Let’s start with a specific moment of loneliness, maybe it will blossom into something more as I put words to it. I was at Trapholt (Kolding, Denmark) recently for their exhibition Connect Me, which is a collection of artworks exploring viewer/participant/audience dynamics in unnerving ways. This ranges from a conversation with an AI which entices you to sell your data ( A Faustian Friendship , Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, 2022) to a kinetic sculpture informed by facial recognition which takes inspiration from the viewers gender ( Cat's Cradle, Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault, 2020). I was surprisingly moved by a very simple work. Approached from afar, traversed by the galleries deep walls, there is a tree in the distance. It looks filmic - somehow flattened by smoke and lighting effect. As I get closer it pixelates, it is not a tree at all - it is a screen, maybe it is not even a real tree, it is a digital affectation of a tree. There a

some shower thoughts: What is a performance? It surely cannot be a moment? It is so fickle. One thing goes wrong and it is not the performance anymore. The dancers are late. The music does not play. The lights are in the wrong place. Then is it not the performance anymore? If the writer pens a famous book about something that happened and was not supposed to... did it not really happen, or at least it happened but it was not the thing itself?  Have I forgotten energy? I was dancing in class and I could feel that the teacher was the only person in the room , in the moment. Everyone was doing the same thing, if you should look at it from the outside. But they were somehow elsewhere? I remember watching the Danish Royal Ballet dance Sharon Eyal’s work and falling asleep halfway through it. I(we) need a reminder that doing isn't enough. I need criticism in the swamp's messiness (hey there Schön). The Truth - Part One. The interchangeableness of meaningful words - choreographers th

I went to Moesgaard Museum today, which I’ve been wanting to visit for a while. It’s a very beautiful building, I had the morning off from work and the sun was shining.   I was particularly interested in catching the three below ethnographic exhibitions: The field work of the ethnographer: Among the Chukchis in Sibiria - the first of a new series of exhibitions about the field work behind the ethnographic part of Moesgaard Museum. The Lives of the Dead - how the dead live on in different cultures and...how the relationship between the living and the dead is experienced.   HOME - Among nomads, refugees, seafarers, and migrants focuses on the meaning of home for different people, who have in common that their homes are in disruption, spread over several countries, in motion, or detached from one physical place. The exhibition is a result of the research project The Materiality of Home among Mobile Groups, conducted by Cecil Marie Schou Pallesen and Anders Emil Rasmussen from Moesgaard