Matt Moriarty
Shared Lines Collaborative Graphic Designer
Environmental and cultural sustainability are key undercurrents in Matt Moriarty’s practice. His work investigates how holism and reductionism of pictorial elements effect the perception of an image. He works predominantly in Painting and Printmaking medium.
Matt was born on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island in the small coastal town of Greymouth. He studied design at the Victoria University of Wellington & Massey University of Wellington, completing his bachelor's degree in 1999, and more recently undertaken postgraduate studies in fine art, graduating in 2017 with an advanced diploma in painting. He has worked in the creative sector in New Zealand and Australia as a graphic designer and mentored art and design at tertiary level.
He currently lives and works from his home studio in Kaikōura, New Zealand.
Shared Lines: Pūtahitanga 2020
The work has been created on a light box using fluid acrylic paint, celophane and masking film. It has then been photographed, digitised and composed in layers in Adobe Photoshop to create the finished composition.
Shared Lines: Wellington 2017 &
Shared Lines: Kaikōura 2019
This work is part of an ongoing investigation into the diagram as a pictorial device in painting.
The process of making involves working with paint horizontally on a flat surface. Acrylic paint is trapped between layers of transparent film to build the image. Acrylic paint in liquid form is isolated from both air and subsequent layers of working, only at times penetrating the layers of membrane and bleeding out into one another. The isolated layers of transparent and opaque pigment create an illusion of the paintings ‘thickness’.
In material, the paint’s liquidity is suspended, unable to harden due to its lack of exposure to air. The work is in flux long after the layering process is completed. Its horizontal address of working is unable to be shifted to the vertical address of the wall for viewing without intervention.
Digitisation of the image through photography and its reproduction through pigment printing allow this vertical axial shift to occur. The resulting illusion of liquidity in the reproduction indexes the horizontal address of making.
The work questions the convention of a printed image (of a painting) as a reproduction. Perhaps the work could be described as a painting for print.