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Reviews
Violette Alfonsi
2012
Sheffield Institute of Arts, 2011
Matthew Conduit’s imposing images have a quality of permanence and of powerful materiality. Whether the lens captures the immemorial stone of Wirksworth’s impressive quarries or the profuse wildlife of untamed woodlands in a more familiar England, Conduit translates the overwhelming visible stimuli that surrounds us, through a photographic production that is both realistic and intensely conceptual.
Paul Hill, MBE
Photographer & Writer
There is an elegant intensity to the way he renders the complexity of tree formations, which is enhanced by his careful use of vantage point and framing. You are drawn in by this, but cannot find a way through. They are not trees, they are implacable photographs.
Roger Taylor
Photography Historian, Curator & Writer
What an extraordinary achievement. It has thrilled me to encounter such an exciting new body of work (Chora exhibition, 2011).
Jade Montserrat
Woodend, Scarborough
July 2012
When we consider recent government spending policies and, of course, cuts, public opinion remains divided, and generally apathy rules. The Brits however demonstrated a united front in 2011.
However, when faced with the proposed privatisation of woodland currently owned by the Forestry Commission, the country declared that it is determined to hold on to its shared inheritance.
Matthew Conduit’s pristine composite photographs, of brash surrounding his home turf, Sheffield, celebrate the baffling and unruly aspect of nature. He presents age-old questions relating to cultural identity, history, tradition and, importantly, preservation. These are grandiose images of verdant hinterland that remain open for us all to share and reflect on, and not take for granted!
He has vividly and sharply magnified flora, exposed and brutalized by the ravages of winter. The images are eerily still, yet loud: the peel of silver birch blazing across the picture frame or the cacophony of ivy creeping beyond the image intent on being heard beyond the frame. Somewhat like a portrait photographer, Conduit has captured the soul of the woodland.
Light abounds in Conduit’s photographs, and although there are no references to the horizon or sky, we are reminded of the magnificent and intricate chain of events that compose natural elements.
These images are the antidote to the conurbation: to entrenched, and monotonous living. Presented at eye level, the viewer could be mistaken for thinking they could step into the scene. Alternatively, the scene could intrude into the gallery and embrace you: we are dealing with controlled photographs of uncontrollable scenes.
The 3D quality of each image, reminiscent of Magic Eye pictures brings comparisons between the surface of these photographs and Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Parallels may be drawn, but Conduit’s photographs stand for a necessity to focus on detail as a metaphor for acknowledging the importance of our own backyards – our common playground.
Dominic Mason
20-21 Arts Centre, Scunthorpe
2012
Matthew Conduit’s photographs are meticulous large scale studies of spaces on the edges of the city. Intricate, elegant and immaculately executed, they depict birch, hawthorn, bramble and buckthorn, excluded from any sense of landscape, pictorially removed from horizon and sky.
Whilst the images appear to represent the forces of 'pure nature', they are all in fact made within dormant areas on the urban borderline that have been altered, used and re-used in varying ways by man over centuries, and are in fact post-industrial landscapes in one form or another.