Used, discarded, and forgotton metal scraps find a new home and bright future with Matt Small. Though predominantly a painter, London-based Small has always sought to make use of ‘waste’ items in his work, utilising old car bonnets and wood in place of traditional canvases.
Continuing this theme through to a different medium, rusted, worn, and misshapen bits of metal are shaped and sliced to create magnificent portraits full of depth and detail.
Small’s work is thematic not only in its medium but also in the subjects he portrays, focusing on undervalued, misrepresented youth. It’s about telling untold stories and changing people’s perspective.
He says it best himself “I thought it’d be interesting to connect the two – that oven door, that shelving unit, that piece of trash to someone – I don’t see it like that, I see that it can be something beautiful and worthwhile. That’s how I see our young people too. Let’s look at their potential, at the hope that’s in all of them.”
A new post by Hanna Simpson, Diary of a Tile Addict, March 2022.