![Lyndon Dadswell. Untitled [Bird] circa 1965, brown gummed paper on metal support and wooden base, height 137 cm width 110 cm depth 95 cm](/cms/cmsimages/banner-images/bequest/PRG-sm-top-bequest7.jpg)
Matthew Hopkins
Born in Penrith, lives and works in Sydney. Matthew employs drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video and sound in his art. Across these diverse mediums his work remains distinctly weird, and is often unified by abstracted, comical, sometimes grotesque (human, demon or clown) figures and faces captured in lonely landscapes or alienated domestic environments. Matthew doses his art with the absurd, the surreal and a sense of humour about humanity and the many internal logics we use to rationalize our personal and collective existential crises.
These drawings evolved from an ongoing project that began in 2008 with a printed illustrated text I produced titled ‘The Chancery’. The text presents an absurd theory of how events in our lives are controlled by a greater force. This force, the Chance Demons, and where this force exists, the Chancery, is explained using abstracted, comic style scientific diagrams to illustrate the surreal text. ‘The Chancery’ explains that the Chance Demons are not physical beings; that they exist as a combination of sounds. But the text also offers confusing suggestions of what the Demons might look like if we were to try and picture them visually.
This new set of drawings extend from this idea, and presents how I imagine the Chance Demons would appear when they are not at work controlling our lives. These studies offer one possibility of what the Demons could look like, and what they might be doing on their days off from controlling duties.
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