Matthew Benington
(24 years old. Born in United Kingdom. Lives in: Falmouth)
University College Falmouth
I am shortly to graduate from my 3rd year BA (hons) Falmouth, before starting an MA in printmaking at the Royal College in October. My work currently manifests in large scale printmaking and sculpture. I enjoy reinterpeting traditional practices; for instance constructing a nitric acid bath outside the studios in order to facillitate etching of at times 8 x 6 foot steel plates. The markmaking on the plates is built up using h ...[more]
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Work of art I would like to make
The Apocryphal Archive; Reinstated cabinets.
In June 1944 Robert Capa was the only photographer present at the D-Day landing on Omaha beach. The form of the intended sculpture is analogous to the subsequent destruction of the bulk of Capa’s negatives in an overheated negative cabinet by a nervous darkroom assistant.
The content of the cabinets relates to the surviving images of my family’s former existence in Germany, amongst appropriated impersonal images of the flight. There is no darkroom assistant to scapegoat blame; rather the malign is of a much deeper kind, eschewing objectivity for an apocryphal archive. As Borges states ‘Man the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges.’
The disparate proportions of the cabinet’s bear some resemblance to the proportions of the Kohler family, and as much as they represent a specific context they evade overt personalisation, so as to form a broader cenotaph to the plight of the refugees in Eastern Germany in 1945.
I should like to extend this project in one of two ways. The first, a literal play on the excavation’s I have made into my family’s turbulent past; constructing a darkened environment, incorporating a walkway surrounding an earth clad pit, housing the unearthed negative cabinets.
The second concept is to create a room analogous to the collapsed archive in Cologne, March 2009. This would house fabricated archive material pertaining to the expulsion of the East Pomeranian’s in a state suspended collapse, parodying the lack of historical recognition regarding the broadest diaspora of the 20th century.
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My Artworks (6)
Click on the images to enlarge
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