Mathew Sawyer creates objects, actions and events that are both troublingly personal and unsettlingly familiar.

In an ongoing series, which the artist describes as 'documentary works', Sawyer chronicles nominal actions through text and photographs. In a recent work Roy Orbison on the Inside of a Light Bulb Box the artist plays homage to one of his favourite musicians; Sawyer purchased a light bulb from his local corner shop, once decorated with a tribute collage to Orbison, Sawyer covertly returned the box to the shelf from which it was purchased ready to be purchased by the next unknowing shopper. Someone to Share My Life With is an earlier work in which Sawyer borrowed his next-door neighbor's shoes which he left outside his door each night. Once in custody of the shoes Sawyer painted intricate swallows on each worn sole. The shoes were then carefully replaced in time for his neighbour to obliviously continue his everyday routine. As with all such narrative works their presentation is as slight as the interventions, which are at once tragicomic and poetic, intimate and universal, conceptual and emotional.


For numerous years Sawyer's musical collective Mathew Sawyer and the Ghosts has expanded and underpinned the artist's lyricism; his third album, How Snakes Eat is soon to be released by Fire Records; previously records have been described as mixing a rare blend of humility, honesty and humour. Through this broad practice Sawyer imparts a sense of solitude, in which he both insinuates a distance between the artist, viewer and those he chooses to involve and a closeness through a shared familiarity of existential anxiety.