THE 2001 TURNER PRIZE
WINNER, MARTIN CREED, once said he made art so that he might better communicate
with other people, because, ultimately, he wanted to be loved. Creed’s
disarmingly honest rationale could equally apply to Mathew Sawyer, a recent
graduate of
An untitled work from 1999
saw Sawyer purchase from the some fruit stall in a
A more recent work Someone to Share My Life With, zoom, titled after a track on
a Television Personalities album, evolved as Sawyer observed over a period of
months his next-door neighbor’s nightly ritual of leaving his shoes outside his
apartment door. One evening Sawyer kidnapped the shoes, taking them into his
own apartment, where he painted a beautifully rendered swallow on each worn
sole. He then carefully replaced the shoes in the hallway before anyone noticed
they were gone. His neighbor awoke the next morning only to carry on with his
daily routine, seemingly oblivious to Sawyer’s tender intervention.
In an earlier work from
2000, Sawyer’s desire to be included, to be seen as part of a greater mass or
social cause, was expressed by means of a stack of crudely painted wooden
placards like those used in political demonstrations. Painted on the face of
the outermost sign were the words No To BAD THINGS. Unable to decide which
cause to support, lacking the confidence to make an independent ethical
decision, or simply overwhelmed by the choice of evils to decry, Sawyer
sought-out of desperation-to ally himself with all protesters and all causes.
For the last couple of
years Sawyer has also been experimenting with songwriting as a kind of quasi-social/sculptural
form. With his lo-fi band the Ghosts (imagine
“Jealous Guy’’-period John Lennon played over the telephone), Sawyer has taken
the reluctant step-for someone so evidently shy-of performing his maudlin
songs, such as “Haven’t Known Many People’’ and “I Know That You Love Me,’’ in
public. Like the late Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, who
infected the sometimes sterile terrain of Conceptual art with unabashed
emotion, Mathew Sawyer isn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. As with
the songs of the musicians he dearly adores (e.g., Robert Wyatt and the
Television Personalities’ Dan Treacy), Sawyer’s works
are at once uncomfortably personal and uncannily universal: After all, doesn’t
everybody want to be accepted, remembered, loved (or
at least have their existence acknowledged)?
Matthew Higgs, curator at
the CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts,