Introduction

For more than twenty years Patrick Matthews has been creating interdisciplinary artworks for a diversity of venues including art festivals, galleries and unorthodox site-specific spaces such as hospitals, churches and monasteries in europe and the UK. His live art performances, site specific installations and drawings have been exhibited at numerous arts festivals and galleries including the Manchester Festival of Art and Television, Plasy Monastery in North West Bohemia and for three years as part of the Triple X Contemporary Investigating Arts Festival in Amsterdam.

His first site specific installations were made by the Berlin Wall whilst under the watchful gaze of the east german border guards and his first art performance was broadcast live on pirate radio station 'Radio 100' Berlin. During which time he was a member of the West Berlin artists collective Stuttgarter Hof, which was named after the squatted hotel on Anhalter Strasse in which the collective lived and worked. Using the building for their art exhibitions and parties.

Between 1997-1999 he exhibited a series of live performances under the heading A Curriculum of Ordeals. These unique, one-time-only solo performances were shown before a live audience in the UK, Czech, France and the Netherlands. Culminating in the performance To Abdicate Humanity which was his personal reaction to the war atrocities in Kosova in 1999. Throughout this series of performances his performance presence was that of an 'anonymous' body, encouraging the audience to consider the subtle, underlying relationships and unspoken psychological interactions that make up much of our everyday being.

Patrick has established independent artist-run studios in the UK, has been an artist-in-residence, a part-time lecturer and guest lecturer both in the UK and the Netherlands. His artworks are preserved and represented through drawings, documents, CD-ROM and video documentation in archives such as the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, England, and the Multimedial Contemporary Art Fund, Odzaci, Yugoslavia.

More recently (2006-2009) Patrick has worked on a large series of ink drawings titled Codified, Figurative and Weightless. These drawings moved through various stages, starting with a series of codified drawings which explored the rendering of an image using the inherent qualities ink. This led onto a series of semi-autobiographical figurative drawings with such titles as Mauled or Lived, which further developed into the layered weightless drawings of 2007-2009, with such titles as Without Hindrence Or Mooring. These drawings combined the two previous stages of codified and figurative drawing and developed them into a more cohesive whole.