As part of Somerset House’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, artist Matthew Stone has created an exhibition titled Healing With Wounds, a brand new series of digital paintings. Somerset House has challenged the artists taking part in their Utopian Voices Here & Now celebration, which has been curated by Shonagh Marshall, to visualize Utopian ways of thinking about contemporary issues including the body, gender, sexuality and race. As part of this, artist and founder of utopian South London-based art collective !WOWOW! Matthew Stone has developed brand new technology and used computer generated 3D sculpting, painting and rendering to explore the idea of the body in today’s society through Healing With Wounds.
Stone’s artworks show the central role that the body and interdependency (on the world and on one another) plays on our healing process. Diverting away from his previously optimistic work and the idea of a neutral utopias, Stone uses the idea of identity and conflict around the body to create art that will keep you talking hours after you see it. To create his work, Stone developed brand new technologies to create the virtual sculptures, and digitally “painted” their contours and shapes before printing them onto raw linen, creating a image that manages to have both a 3D and 2D effect at the same time. Hand-painted, abstract brush strokes on lie on top of digital sculptures of bodies, which are shown both in play and at war, to create a sense of depth and perspective. Sounds like a heavy topic we grant you, but Stone’s work is light, bright and full of technical details. It’s almost like it came out of utopia itself.
Healing With Wounds is on at Somerset House, 6th July to 29th August 2016.
