Mat’s a writer and visual artist based in Falmouth, where he works on Falmouth University’s MA Illustration: Authorial Practice. With a longstanding interest in the arts’ contribution to the emerging ecosophical turn, he’s drawn to the notion of ‘illustrating ecological recovery’ – an idea he stole from Greenspirit founder Albert LaChance’s adaptation of the 12 Step programme.
Mat’s recent practice includes a series of image & word poetry chapbooks, catalogued under his own imprint Strandline Books along with related collaborative projects & research. Having regularly published with the Dark Mountain Project since 2010, in 2017 Mat acted as guest Art Editor on Issue 11 of their Journal, and curated a recent blog series for them which flowed out of the Art.Earth In Other Tongues Summit in June 2017.
Mat\’s had two new essays published online in 2017, both of which took shape as Art.Earth papers: An Underswell of Divination, about the poet Ted Hughes\’ and the artist Leonard Baskin\’s illustrational collaborations, and Meinrad Craighead and the Animal face of God, on the shifting personification of the sacred within the work of the American painter, writer and Benedictine nun, Meinrad Craighead.
In June 2017 Mat taught a five-day residential Art.Earth Short Course with the poet Dr. Alyson Hallett, Intimate Ecologies, which experimented with writing, drawing and improvised ritual as means to enter into a reciprocal conversation with place. He’s currently involved in co-steering the second Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival, and working on a new collaborative book of images and poems with the artist Kate Walters, founder of the Cornwall-based arts initiative Drawing Down the Feminine.
Website: https://www.strandlinebooks.co.uk