Matthew Smith was born in 1976 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. He studied at Wakefield College (1992-94), University of Northumbria, Newcastle (1994-97) and at The Slade School of Fine Art, London (1997-99). He has undertaken artist residencies at Wohnmaschine, Berlin and at Artgene, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. He has exhibited widely in this country and abroad, including at, Jerwood Space, London, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, Wohnmaschine, Berlin, Fa Projects, London, Art Sway, Hampshire, Bloc projects, Sheffield. He is currently working on a site-specific commission for re;place in Derbyshire. He has lived and worked in London since 1997.
SECOND NATURE brings together the work of Vicki Kerr and Matthew Smith, which explores human kind's relationship to and philosophical distance from nature. Both artists reject the idea of one all encompassing original 'nature' in favour of infinite interpretations, copies, and inventions of the natural. Humans value nature for its health and integrity over the artificial works of man, seeing it as real or authentic. It is though a human construct who's meaning is not fixed and permanent but is created, altered and re-imagined again and again by successive generations to many different ends. Their practice explores, reveals and navigates a way through these myriad natures.
Vicki Kerr has taken two found texts, which describe two differing encounters with zoos one in China and one in England and re-made them in relief usi...