Artist Talk: Matthew Burrows
Just Another One Of Our Golden Girls by Matthew Burrows, find the original here.
1. What inspired you to create this piece?
When I am not creating a work I spend my time constantly researching the topics that interest me. I do a lot of reading on topics such as climate change and environmentalism, as well as technological innovation and globalization. I research cultures and trends and how they are affected by the ever changing fast paced world we live in. I had been wanting to make a large work about environmentalism and how technology and globalization has affected the natural world and humans. This piece was inspired by a single idea that we are losing touch with our connection to the natural world, as if we are something separate from it. So the work aims to connect many subjects around that idea to create an open-ended narrative about the subject matters for
people to visually explore.
2. Can you tell me about the creation process that went into it?
In regards to the process, as I said, a lot of research is the first step. Exploring information leads to ideas for imagery. Then, acquiring imagery leads to a loose idea of the piece, which is never all planned from the start. I start in one corner and let the work evolve as I piece ideas and my own social commentary together. There is some pencil sketching first, then the finalizing of imagery with ink and finally the color.
3. What’s one or two interesting things you think we ought to know about this piece?
The large human/robot with the drill on the bottom left side of the piece represents the industries that plunder our environment without a care. Profit is the only goal, and the consequences are left out of their thought. But it is also about the workers, who carry out the work and how they are mentally affected by it. The wolf biting his shoulder is a prediction that nature will fight back. We are silly to presume it is unaware of how we are changing it.
Second, if you look in the top left corner you see a person wearing a orange and blue hat with a mask on their face, intertwined with a cargo plane taking off. That is me. I rarely include myself in my work but I felt appropriate in this piece. It represents my desire to travel to places where the ideas behind this place are unfolding and perhaps acquire vast amount of research for new work as well as raise social awareness behind the issues involved.
One more interesting fact is that, including research and actual work time, this piece took approximately 7 months to complete. It was the largest and most complicated artistic undertaking I have taken on to date.
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