Matthew Andrews

History And Background

My 20’s were spent working in ad agencies and selling on the phone until utter boredom lured me to travel. It was in Melbourne that I first saw a hologram and it was a seminal moment. Although I had been a keen amateur photographer with my own darkroom from the age of 11, I knew in an instant that holography had something no other medium did, something that I felt inside and resonated with. Not only was it exciting to be a ‘pioneer’ but holography seemed to offer a medium that could talk in visual ways about the same cutting edge ideas as the top quantum minds of our day.

It is now proffered by Hawkins and the like that ‘reality’ operates like a hologram and we are but holographic projections occupying the same space and time as other projections that we don’t see (until we find out how). Holography offered me a way to take part in this serious debate, exploring cutting edge ideas and raising questions of significance.

I graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1989 with the Prudential Award for Holography and won a John Downs Trust Award in 1990. I have exhibited for over 22 years in New York, Miami, London, Paris, Haifa, Ghent, Brussels, The Edinburgh Festival, Geneva, Panama, Chile, Farnham amongst many smaller venues, showing a wide range of different types of lenticular, holographic and optical pictures and optically-based installations.

Not long after the RCA, it became very expensive to get holographic materials, and to this day, it is still hard to make them in a viable way. Lenticulars (which arrived around 1695) gave me almost all the potentialities that holography gave me but without the dark room, chemicals, tedium and limited colour of holography. Lenticulars set me free to experiment and explore my imagination without financial ruin. It is the lenticular medium that I now use to make my work. They allow me to explore 3 dimensions in new ways, developing a new language for creative thought and it is lenticulars that offer me the opportunity to continue to melange space and time to great effect.

Ideas and Inspiration

I have ideas for everything. I keep having ideas that I can not possibly find the time to make. I have several film ideas, two books, a play, songs, political solutions, traffic flow ideas, buildings, large public landscape projects, a polystyrene garden room, large scale art works, exterior cladding, furniture, lighting, walls, floors and ceilings, especially for the interior design of gents bogs. Having ideas is just a muscle in the brain, with exercise it works well.

I get inspiration from my life, garbage, TV graphics, science, movies, books, the internet and watching people. Rubbish has taught me that what has been thrown away or is unwanted is not useless or uninteresting and also to look in corners. Those people who do the graphics for Newsnight and other news/current affairs programmes distil large topics to fresh new bursts of visualised information everyday; it’s beautiful and on the pulse.

Science is the frontier where ‘never before’ things are happening and it keeps your thoughts open. Movies are great stories. People, well they never cease to surprise or inspire me. Human plight is a great source of imagery, fact and stories. The internet is a godsend when searching for anything.

From palette to picture

A lot of time is spent out with a camera or just collating subject matter and thoughts. Then there is a lot of messing about on a computer, scanning, editing, cropping, colouring, hours sometimes, making the pictures the way you want them, making them fit together in a piece and deliver the desired result. Creating a lenticilar image is a complex process which uses specialist materials and a great deal of skill.

The process involves laying a blank laminate-covered screen over the top of the print and very carefully registering the lens and paper together until paper and lenticules line up accurately. You have just one chance to marry them together. This is then fed through rollers, whilst avoiding hair, dust, paper fragments, rain drops, telephone calls and keeping it all accurate to ¼ of a pixel over 4ft.

If all goes well, a wonderful lenticular print will emerge. If not, you have a piece of paper attached to a piece of plastic, which at least is good for flooring, I have found. Finished pieces are mounted on a flat rigid surface and then routed for perfect edges. It is then ready for framing or blocking or whatever finishing it needs.