MATT CROOKSHANK

The core of my creative process is language construction. Each project I undertake begins with the crafting of a unique framework, developed through experimentation and intuition, which serves as both a procedural structure and a source of inspiration. These languages blend the conceptual, the emotive, and the aesthetic - traversing both narrative and abstraction, to become the scaffolding upon which my artistic endeavours are built. I recognize my practice primarily as a strategy for exploration, rather than strictly existing as separate practices in different media.

I am motivated by the possibility of capturing the ineffable in a way that can be intuitively felt through the visual communication of my work. In this way, my practice both exists as a real, tangible studio based painting craft, while simultaneously expressing itself in the realm of the intangible digital creation that has to be ‘rendered’ photographically to be seen - yet these rendered photographs are only evidentiary of the digital process. I radically pursue these types of contradictions as keys to revealing the deeper paradoxical fabric. 

While this all may feel rather verbose, for me my practice is essentially playful gaming through a humorous subversion of meaning. I am relentlessly aiming at something which exists and does not exist, something that cannot exist but must exist. I am in pursuit, and being chased. I am guilty of being innocent. 

“What can be shown, cannot be said.”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein