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Artist, performer, photographer, DJ, squatter... Matthew Stone explains what it’s like being a 24 hour creative. Matthew is represented by Union Gallery in London and was part of artist collective !WOW!WOW! who performed at Tate Britain in 2008.
I left school after my GCSEs. I’d always known I wanted to go to Art School and I wanted to go to London. In the end I found a BTEC in Art and Design at the local college. Basically it was like a two year Foundation - in the first year it was really multidisciplinary – we did everything and then did a second year where we specialised.
At that stage I did graphics and when I was 18 I got into Camberwell on the Graphics course. On the second year of my course I realised it was totally the wrong context for what I wanted to achieve so I changed to painting.
Like all types of creativity it was about communication, but a very conscious approach to communication – learning to manipulate an audience to express a specific idea. I found that when I went to painting it was much more about the motivation for creating and investing in the ideas behind what you want to communicate.
There was definitely no expectation to paint. I think it depends from College to College but my experience of it was that you could do anything you wanted, whether it was performance or sculptural - if you had an interest in Painting then any work could be discussed within that context.
I’d always been interested in the idea of putting on shows with friends. While I was at College we organised exhibitions. There’s one that I organised in my first year where we got access to 3 railway arches in South London and we put on a show there.
When you’re at College you do have a student loan and you have a studio so it’s an amazing period because you can afford to live and can meet loads of other people who are interested in similar things. So it wasn’t until I left I decided I couldn’t afford to pay rent and have a studio without getting a job, which was something I wanted to avoid at all costs. I had supplemented a lot of stuff by DJing at exhibition after parties and clubs.
When we left College, because we had access to such large spaces we had studios to make work in and we did a series of group exhibitions. The buildings we were squatting in were going to be torn down and redeveloped and a lot of the time we ended up in agreements with the people that owned them to act as guardians for the space.
Collaborations are really difficult things because people’s work is really personal to them and letting go of that is really difficult. I think the reason that !WOW!WOW! worked was because it was quite light-hearted. We all supported each other, so if someone was a sculptor who needed something documenting and someone else was a photographer they could do it for them. We were working for people as professionals and putting our name to things - showing something, getting feedback – I think that’s a real way to progress with the work.
I think the most important thing about going to Art School is meeting other like-minded people and having a period where you do have a studio and you can get it wrong. I certainly don’t think that having a degree makes you an artist. Anyone can be an artist – everyone is creative. When those actions become passionate, for me, that’s when it becomes art. There are millions of people who haven’t gone to College – it’s not right for everybody.
Something that people don’t realise when they go to University is that it’s very different from school in the sense that you don’t get taught very much. Within Fine Art there’s an idea that it’s completely inappropriate to teach people how to paint.
Just keeping working, don’t see it as an end of a chapter just because you’ve finished College.
