Andy Willoughby

“Brush becomes break and smear becomes snap.”

My work explores the material limits of paint; exposing a new set of language with which describe its materiality and question the connotations that it carries. This is done by pouring it out and allowing it to dry before breaking and forming with my hands.

Dialoguing with the material as equal voices in the making process, as it both resists and directs the making it reveals its inert agentic, lively qualities that extend to all material experience. Material theorist Jane Bennet calls this ‘Vibrant Matter’; that all materials are constantly working on us as we on them.

By employing physical form, shadow and reflection in contrast to paint’s normal parameters, I seek a level of ambiguity in the reading of the medium, in order to jar the reception of material experience, and a playfulness with painterly language.