Marking ten years since the death of Cornish artist Matthew Lanyon, this exhibition includes key works contextualised by the poetry he wrote throughout his life, addressed to friends, lovers, and to his mother. Matthew's poetry articulated his frustration with politics, as well as expressing feelings of fearfulness, comedy and love. His written words went hand in hand with his art, often finding their way into paintings, constructions and onto the walls of his studio.
One of his short poems, titled Only Joy, was written onto the labels of a small collection of homeopathic bottles; this began a twenty year project in which fragments of language were written onto corked and filled vials, as remedies for the ills of mortals. This special exhibition includes two of those works, Sitting in a Field 88, and Write Me a Few Short Lines She Said, from that definitive Bottlesseries.
Matthew also wrote and framed handwritten or typed stream of consciousness works, his Self Portraits. His final poems, Hurricane Matthew, and My Sh-- Doctor is Leaving were left on his bathroom wall, amongst tokens of love and death-defying works of graffiti.
Other works in this collection are taken from the last exhibition Matthew ever held, shortly before his death in 2016. The artwork which titled that New Craftsman show, named In the Tracks of the Yellow Dog, was his very first work in tapestry, and dealt with the grief he felt following his mother’s death just one year earlier. It references Yellow Dog Dingo of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories, which Matthew and his mother shared when he was a child. This work and the accompanying paintings are filled with the iconography that Matthew developed over his lifetime as part of his own, distinct visual language.
These shapes and figures connect to subjects including Cornwall’s ancient landscape, its industrial mining heritage, and tales of Greek myth, from which Matthew drew endless inspiration: a disc of orange sun above the ocean, the slanted triangle of St Michael’s Mount, Pegasus the winged horse, the lights of Land’s End airfield, Europa the Bull, the outline of The Island chapel, layers of tin and copper in the earth, and the sensual curves of a woman’s body embedded in the Cornish landscape, all stand in his artwork as symbols of important cultural histories, including his own.