ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE: A SERIES OF DRAWINGS TEACHING BASIC SKILLS FOR SUCCESS IN CHALLENGING SITUATIONS
DRAWINGS TEACHING SUCCESS IN CHALLENGING SITUATIONS, 2011-2017
COLIN MATTHES (US)
In 2012, Colin Matthes spent a year on the barren Atlantic coast of Ireland, where the weather is an ever-present and dominating factor in people’s daily lives — from extreme rain to harsh, gusting winds. Each day, the artist would need to take the hour walk from his cottage to the studio. “I would find myself screaming and laughing, freezing and soaked, on these walks across rock in the middle of nowhere, and I began to imagine all the ways people have ‘made do’ here for generations with access to almost nothing,” he says. “What would I need to know in order to thrive while stranded here? These considerations were the beginning of Essential Knowledge.”
This series of work has continued to grow since Colin’s time in Ireland. For the past five years, he has worked this a series of drawings, teaching skills for success in challenging situations. He has made forty drawings while working in three countries and gathering content from personal experience, research, and imagination. The subjects range from surviving a grizzly attack to soothing a baby, from making coffee on the road to constructing a mobile border wall.
BIO
Colin Matthes grew up in an old farmhouse a mile away from a village with three bars, a post office, and the world’s greatest junk parade. Installing temporary electricity at small town county fairs, wiring trailer parks, and punk rock formed the way he makes things and views the world.
Lately, he has been bringing his infant daughter too close to bears, making graphics for activist campaigns, working too many jobs, and visualising his versions of essential knowledge.