Matthew Bradley

Mathew Bradley is an Adelaide based artist who has this real interest in materiality and the process of making. In many ways, I think, that runs through a lot of the work in the MCA. It's really evident in Mathew's work. This is coupled in Mathew's career with this sort of fascination with the limits of knowledge, the limits of our exploration. In many ways, his practise in recent years, or recent decades, has looked at things like space exploration, sort of exploring space or even exploration on land which brings us back to ideas of colonial arrivals etc... But, in this work, what Mathew's done is really sort of imagine or think through something about the skills, the really basic skills that might be required if we think beyond the limits of our knowledge now, or in fact at the point in which the point at which some of that knowledge might collapse.

Let's call it a post-apocalyptic age or beyond some point of crisis whether it's environmental crisis or social crisis that has brought the world to some type of ruin. What sort of skills would be critical to our survival? One of them is metalwork, to actually make tools and implements, we see that in all societies, historically. This is coupled with his own fascination with teaching himself skills and also in this case, skills associated with art making, skills associated, for example, with sculpture.

He has set himself a task, first of all, he's researched through on-line sources and books how to actually make his own metal furnace. He's made that out of liquid petroleum gas canisters, he's then also made tools associated with working that furnace. Those tools and that furnace and the crucibles required to melt down metals are actually on display in the gallery. It's really important for Matthew, I think it one of the fascinating things about his practise, and he wants to reveal the tools of the making of the work as critical to the work or indeed as part of the work.

Then he set himself the task of making 100 vessels, partly because 100 is a nice number, it's a round number, but it's also a substantial number. It's a number that he felt would test him in terms of designing these vessels. They're not all the same, in fact, no two are the same. But also to develop the practical skills working with different metals in his backyard furnace, different casting techniques as well to make these objects.

So far he's made 33 objects, we have 32 on display here. So, he's a third of the way through the project, probably around 18 months, something like that, into it, so it's a long term project. I think that the objects are extraordinary, the detail of design in each is really quite amazing. But, they also reveal the flaws, because the flaws are actually critical to the project, because the project is about making and learning through making.

They also have these different connotations, style connotation or even use connotations. Some look like vases, some look like some sort of strange elements of an engine or some other construction. Some look like containers, sealed containers. Some have a kind of almost arabesque quality. Some look they're slightly sinister, they could have, you know, like something unexploded or some other type of device. They could, some have mediaeval quality to them.

None of them are specifically designed for a time period. I mean, some of them have a sort of modernist sculptural element to them, quite formal in that regard. It’s almost like if you dug these things up in a thousand years’ time and you recognised that they all came from our time. What would that say about our time? That we have this huge array of styles available to us. But, set out like this on this large plinth I think they're just an extraordinary manifestation of an artist's capacity to skill themselves and to think through materials.