‘Bread and Stone’
New Talent profiles new works by Fine Art students at Sunderland University. Ferguson Matthews’ image has been selected to coincide with James Rigler’s exhibition in the project space, which confuses real materials and illusions. Rigler creates the illusion of water using painted glass, and uses low-grade, man-made materials like printed vinyl or DIY-store timber, alongside hand-crafted objects.
Matthews similarly remarks that his works are “Simple metaphors mined ad-infinitum. I have been working with the idea of ‘bread and stone’ as a metaphor recently and used glass, paint, sculpture and digital imaging to explore the qualities of these terms. I’m constantly thinking about word plays and rhyming, and how turns of phrase can be made concrete or literal images. My work is about finding pleasure where it is over-used, over-tied: I like over-obvious, corny or tongue-in-cheek visual metaphors, that only advertisers might use. Here, I present the viewer with ‘food for thought’. Against the blue sky is ‘heavenly bread’. And son on.”
