Matilda Slade

This project centres around personal psychoanalysis over the course of the year.

In the beginning, my work reflected my attitude. Melancholic. Staring at the ground, I became drawn to puddles; the reflections within them reminded me of a portal to an alternate universe, some ethereal Elsewhere where the grass was greener. I became fascinated by nature and dreams, and the solace they provided me with. By surrounding myself in nature or locking myself in my daydreams, I was able to escape – but in doing so, I wasn’t improving my situation, just avoiding it.

As the COVID-19 virus arrived in the UK and the country went into lockdown, many of us became immersed in our immediate surroundings. We were forced to pause, trapped in a repetitive cycle, yearning for excitement. Within this stasis, events which emulated the world pre-lockdown continued, highlighting fundamental issues within our society’s infrastructure; now, in a situation where many of us were unoccupied, these issues gained more attention than they might have in ordinary circumstances. The pandemic and the events which followed had warped our definition of normality, and exposed opportunity for reform.

I had reached a point of personal optimism which I had never felt before. Equipped with tools to cope with my struggles, I could see a profound change in the way I addressed life. To sustain this, I turned back to nature; I had looked at humanity’s reaction to the pandemic, and I wanted to look at how nature had adapted. Found imagery showed international trends of adaptation: air pollution disappeared in large cities, wild animals explored populous urban areas. These led me to photography of plants growing and taking over architecture – in these, nature reclaimed its space, and I saw in them a twisted optimism.

Throughout the process I aimed to use materials which reflected not only the restrictions the pandemic had created, but also the attitude of the Arte Povera movement: emerging in Italy in the early 20^th century, they challenged the high-gloss definitions of art, and sought poetry in the materials that surround us. I aimed to use recyclable materials through this process, ones which might have been discarded had I not intervened.

Finally, I searched for a convergence of the three themes I had explored, through a jar decorated with images of domestic settings and puddle reflections and displayed on a plot of land reclaimed by nature. The making of preparatory drawings of this sculptural event took me full circle and felt poetic; I had progressed from drawings which were meticulously drawn and obsessed with finality, to ones which, partial and unfinished, reflected a new courage and freedom.