Matthew Hollett

Arteles Creative Centre is near Hämeenkyrö, Finland. The site used to be a school (its most famous alumni is Frans Eemil Sillanpää, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature). It’s now used for artist residencies.

I spent a month here along with a dozen other writers and artists from all over the place. We worked on our various projects and collaborations, explored the surrounding farmland and forests, drank way too much coffee, and tried sauna and salmiakki ice cream.

I made macro photos of lichen and moss, went on many long walks, read Tove Jansson’s short stories, and worked on some poems and a novel. This is reindeer lichen, which I’ve always known as “caribou moss.”

In the woods I came across a strange phenomenon called “hair ice,” which is caused by a fungus in dead wood that prevents ice from recrystallizing. Finland is magical. I loved my time at Arteles – apply for one of their residencies!

Arteles Residency

In November 2019 I participated in Enter Text, a writing+art residency at Arteles Creative Centre in Finland.

I gave a poetry reading at Brigus Public Library as part of the residency. I read from Optic Nerve, a collection of poems about photography which won the 2017 NLCU Fresh Fish Award.

Kent Cottage is a registered heritage structure overlooking the town of Brigus, Newfoundland. It was famously inhabited by Rockwell Kent, and artist Jake Folensbee set up Landfall Trust to preserve the property.

The tiny, rustic cottage is full of Jake Folensbee's paintings. It’s entirely off-grid, with a furnace, limited electricity (from solar panels), and water from a nearby stream. It’s a lovely, charming, strange, slightly spooky place.

Overlooking the beautiful town of Brigus, Landfall is a quiet, secluded place to write and walk. I worked on some new poems, and finalized my manuscript for Album Rock. I feel really lucky to have spent time here.

Landfall Residency

As part of the 2018 Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing Award, I spent two weeks writing in historic Kent Cottage in Brigus, Newfoundland.

A House By The Water is an exhibition of work I made during a summer residency at The Rooms in St. John’s. I set out to explore the changing architectural landscape of Newfoundland. How has the way people inhabit the island changed, and what does this reveal about our relationship to it? How does the history of a place change how we see it?

A digital projection shows lavish suburban homes tumbling into the ocean, one after another. These kinds of houses have sprung up all over the island, occupying hillsides, jostling for the best view. They often seem comically oversized, almost surreal, as if they’re meant to be somewhere else. Dream homes.

Dwall consists of beachworn bricks suspended in midair. In making this piece, I’d set out to find an artifact that had been eroded by the water, some evidence of a lasting architectural presence or authenticity. As it turns out, these bricks are not very old, dating from the Smallwood era, but they’re already falling apart, clay crumbling back into earth.

I came across the word dwall in Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, where Smallwood says “to dwall was to spend a night neither asleep nor awake, but somewhere in between. I at last had a single word to describe how I almost always slept.” Dwall, to me, suggests an intentional unconsciousness, an understanding while pretending not to understand, which is perhaps a common strategy when coping with drastic change.

I began to realize that my project wasn’t about houses, but the space between the houses, their relationship to each other and the surrounding land. It was about communities, sustainability, potential futures. It’s about how building patterns and desires reflect larger societal changes. It’s about small moments, like light glinting off waves, and larger concerns, like rising ocean levels.

In the video A City By The Sea, light glittering in ocean waves takes the shape of tiny houses. When making this work I was thinking about older ways of building on the land. Rural vernacular architecture has a kind of lightness, as described by Robert Mellin in Newfoundland Modern: Architecture in the Smallwood Years…

“The houses and outbuildings of Newfoundland’s numerous coastal settlements had a temporary, fragile, and even nomadic character in form, construction, materials, and use, requiring frequent maintenance, rebuilding, and relocation. Many of these buildings appeared to perch tentatively on the land without changing it, leaving no traces when they were moved or abandoned.”

A single photograph, Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (after Hokusai), bridges this installation work with my practice of walking, writing and making photographs. I often work with computers and code, but my thinking patterns are discursive, drawn from wandering and finding things. A House By The Water was at The Rooms from Oct. 2015 – Jan. 2016, and the projections were shown in the 2017 Bonavista Biennale.

A House By the Water

A solo exhibition of video and installation work at The Rooms in St. John’s, exploring the changing architectural landscape of Newfoundland. 2015. Mary MacDonald kindly wrote about this exhibition.

Field Notes is a book of photos and poems about writing outdoors, and explores symmetries between human relationships and the connections we develop with landscape and place. It’s a self-published artist’s book. I received a Professional Project Grant from ArtsNL to work on this project.

The brief passages of Field Notes suggest distance and longing. They are about relationships, in an ambiguous way: a distant friend, a long-lost lover, a cherished place. They share an anonymity with messages scrawled on highwayside stones, declarations of love carved in treebark, or postcards found in a curiosity shop.

This project originated with some earlier experiments. A few years ago, walking in Point Pleasant Park, I found a seagull feather. I dipped it in seawater and wrote with it on a rock, the first phrase that came to mind: i miss you more on cloudy days. I photographed the words as they evaporated.

Later I made another of these, spelling out with fragments of seaweed: why am i not surprised. I left the words for the wind to disassemble. I called these gestures Field Notes, and wrote a poem to accompany each.

A video from this project was screened as part of Eastern Edge Gallery’s Wade In video series.

Field Notes

Photos and poems about writing outdoors, exploring symmetries between human relationships and the connections we develop with landscape and place. 2014.

Small Landmarks is a synthesis of photography and notebook writings, a visual journal of walking and thinking. The work is about finding things, making connections, stringing small moments together into something more.

The pages contain photographic diptychs paired with handwriting from my notebooks. The book itself is loosely structured around places I’ve lived: western Newfoundland, Halifax and Montreal.

Small Landmarks is assembled from an archive of eight years of photos and field notes about walking and seeing.

I originally designed this book for iPads and sold it through Apple Books, but it’s no longer available for sale. Get in touch if you’d like a PDF!

Excerpts from Small Landmarks were published in the Spring 2015 issue of Riddle Fence, along with an essay by Craig Francis Power which touches on the work.

Small Landmarks

A visual journal about finding things, making connections, stringing small moments together into something more. 2013.

In Interchange, my research into walking as a cultural activity and creative act merged with my fascination with interstitial public space. My previous photographic and poetic work often explored a sense of place and relationship with landscape, and in developing this site-specific installation I also became interested in the history of the public space immediately surrounding Anna Leonowens Gallery.

The Cogswell Interchange, located just northwest of the gallery, was long considered a notorious example of misguided urban planning. Constructed in the 1970s, it was designed to integrate with an elevated six-lane freeway which was never built. Interchange contrasted “supermodern” architectural reactions to the interchange (such as a nearby elevated walkway) with the wandering, tangential language of an historical walking tour.

I built a long corridor of scaffolding and plywood, using materials which suggested a construction site. In my thesis, this was discussed in the context of Marc Augé’s Non-Places, poet Lisa Robertson’s “soft architecture,” de Certeau’s concept of the city as palimpsest, and Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

My thesis was located on a clipboard hung on the wall by the window. The contrast between pedestrian-scale and car-scale infrastructure is especially notable in this part of the downtown. Anna Leonowens Gallery is bounded on one side by Granville Mall, with its cobblestones and historic buildings, and on the other by Hollis Street, often bottlenecked at this point with heavy trucks exiting the Cogswell Interchange.

There was a small hole in the plywood wall (and another one nearer the entrance). Visitors were invited to peer into the otherwise inaccessible interior space.

Inside, there was a large digital projection showing an elevated pedestrian walkway, recognizable as a site just outside the gallery entrance. The image was a live webcam feed. Superimposed white text faded in and out, constantly changing. The text here reads, “Intentionally, or by accident.” Other passages included: “This area was largely destroyed by fire.” “Elsewhere, changes came more slowly.” “You can smell the salt water from here.”

The texts are derived from In Halifax Town, a walking tour of Halifax written in 1975 by Louis W. Collins. Collins was a local historian and avid walker who was instrumental in preserving this particular block of historic buildings, despite encroaching developments such as the Cogswell Interchange. His book intersperses commentary about places of interest with personal anecdotes and childhood memories.

This is a screen capture of the webcam image and text being projected. The text was added using Javascript. The webcam captured an image every four seconds for the duration of the exhibition, and was broadcast only in the gallery.

The pedestrian walkway is an enclosed, elevated access corridor connecting Barrington Place Shops and Scotia Square to nearby office towers. It provides a bridge over Barrington, Hollis, and Lower Water Streets where they converge near the Cogswell Interchange. The section of walkway framed in Interchange passes directly over the former route of Buckingham Street, one of several avenues erased by the development of the mall.

A view of the installation from Hollis Street, where passers-by can peer in at the projection through an aperture in the window.

I created a detailed model of the installation using SketchUp. The hallway at the upper right is the gallery entrance. Interchange was at Anna Leonowens Gallery from March 25 – April 5, 2008. “The world of supermodernity does not exactly match the one in which we believe we live,” writes Marc Augé in Non-Places, “for we live in a world that we have not yet learned to look at. We have to relearn to think about space.”

Interchange

My MFA thesis exhibition at NSCAD University investigated walking as a creative act, interstitial public space, and the history of the urban landscape around Anna Leonowens Gallery. 2008.

Forthcoming

Optic Nerve

Recent Projects

Distancing
on the Lachine Canal

Between Seasons on the North Head Trail

Album Rock

Newfoundland Quarterly

Recent Publications

Hard Ticket

Best Kind

Atlas Obscura