When I speak with Sydney-based drawer and sculptor Matt Bromhead, he describes his work as “intelligent play”. Though his modesty immediately kicks in: “that sounds presumptuous on my part to call it that.” Yet the more I look at his works, the more I see how line, space, movement and time have been reflected on and preserved with striking thoughtfulness and integrity.
Since graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Sydney’s University of New South Wales in 2009, Bromhead has proved the intelligence of his humble works to no end. After nabbing an Australia Council ArtStart grant in 2010, the artist has gone on to present solo exhibitions at Galerie pompom, Sydney, in 2018 and Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney, in 2020. His work was curated into Art Month Sydney’s Collectors Space at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, in 2017 and he was a finalist in the 2021 Dobell Drawing Prize and 2020 Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize. Sydney’s Olsen Gallery added Bromhead to its stable after a successful solo show at its Annexe gallery in October 2021.
Bromhead’s sculpture and drawing practices are closely related; they ping pong back and forth, bouncing the same ideas between them yet transpiring in seemingly opposing mediums. Both are exercises in line and formalism, yet while his drawings take shape through an almost automatic process of putting pencil or ink to paper, his sculptures rely on the qualities and characteristics of his found objects to reveal themselves as finished pieces. Bromhead is always on the lookout for bits and pieces: old parts of shipping ropes, timber or miscellaneous parts of once-loved objects found strewn across pavements. More often than not commencing with a drawing or line study, the artist will find forms or postures reveal themselves and dictate his next move.
For his new body of work showing at Olsen Gallery in June 2022, Bromhead tells me he will present a series of layered drawings. Building layers upon layers of Kozo paper, the process behind these works is a mediation on time and patience.
While it often takes days to dry the paste-like glue he uses to fix his layers, each layer is marked by Bromhead in a quick yet deliberate manner, resulting in a shadow effect of ink marks whispering through the semi-translucent paper.
There is a dichotomy between these playfully spontaneous gestures and the arduous process of layering his surfaces. “Using brushes on long poles to lay the marks physically distances me from the surface while I work,” he says. “Each layer gives me the chance to respond to the marks laid previously. It also takes the anxiety or immediate critically out of performing the marks.”
The artist is clear not to add any didactic or conceptual meaning to his practice, rather he allows the formal elements of his works to direct their own purpose – be that comedy, beauty or intelligence. Bromhead acknowledges that his role in bringing objects or ink marks together is to push them in a new direction. They are works in motion; aesthetic riddles to be solved.
