Moving beyond “simple sculpture” into wild flights of fancy and imagination
If art were a research science like physics, local surrealist sculptor Matthew Dutton could be considered to be like Einstein or Heisenberg. His darkly whimsical pieces immediately lodge themselves in the memories of their observers, evidence of a lifetime of experimentation and analysis.
The majority of his personal work ranges from slightly creepy to horrifying, nightmarish, and outright demonic—but you would never know it from the art he makes at his job as the display coordinator at Warehouse Row’s Anthropologie store.
Matt can make anything one can imagine, and quite a few things that one might never dream of. He uses all of his skill sets in any way he can to feed his family, taking a variety of commissions from local businesses, and sending his personal work to galleries abroad (the galleries here are a bit too conservative to exhibit his sculpture).
He recently sent a 12” tall piece inspired by the Fukushima radiation disaster entitled “Daiichi Dream” to the Ghost Gallery in Washington, and finished up a bunch of dead bodies for Escape Chattanooga.
“These bodies are realistic, and made from the inside out; they have skeletons inside, with pink guts.” Dutton says. “They get better and better as they deteriorate from use—you can rip the flesh off, and they just look gnarly.”
Escape Chattanooga calls Matt for all of their prop needs, and he is designing new rooms for them this year. He still does contract work for Rock City, where he worked before Anthropologie, and he sometimes volunteers at Wayne-O-Rama.
He is passionate about his art, saying “I really love materials, and I love techniques, and I always love experimenting with new things. Sometimes I learn a new technique at work, and I will try to incorporate that into a new piece at home.”
Though the physical composition of his work changes constantly, there is a material thread throughout it. As he increases his material vocabulary, incorporating new substances and techniques into the work, he inspires himself to create the unexpected.
“I don’t really try to keep myself to one look, though I have done that in the past, creating a series of similar pieces,” Dutton says. “A lot of the time, I will have a rough idea of how I want to start something, but the end result is never in mind.”
Matt balances the work he does at his job by staying up late in his studio.
“I work on my own art at night, and I don’t sleep very much,” he explains. “When I’m working in my shop, I get this second wind, and it’s almost working in a hypnagogia, a dreamlike state—I’m doing these productive creative things when I should be asleep.
“When I’m working at my job throughout the day, I’m thinking about what I’m going to do whenever I get to that piece, so by the time I actually get there, I just go into motion and know exactly what to do.”
He is an expert at taking a material and pushing it to do something it’s not designed to do. By treating the material in a way that is unorthodox, he can make something unrecognizable that nobody can replicate.
“I try not to let what other people think about my work dictate what it is going to be,” he says. “I used to struggle with it; if I made work just to sell, it took a lot of the passion out of it. Having the job doing something creative all day takes away that pressure of having to make something successful. I’m allowed to make something horrible, without worrying about selling it.”
This free approach to sculpture leads him to discovery. In addition to being aesthetically effective, his sculptures represent the documentation of his scientific method.
“I’ve been experimenting with borax crystals, growing the crystals onto the sculpture, so that they become part of the sculpture,” Dutton notes. “I like to figure out how to do things for myself—I don’t really read how to do things; I just jump into them. This might waste some time, but learning on my own makes things stick in my mind. My most recent works have been taking little bits of each technique to create an object with a history.”
This year, Chattanooga will see Matt making history with one of his largest projects to date. It will be big, it will be downtown, but the organizers of the project want to keep it a secret for now. “I’m not at liberty to talk about it yet.”
See more of Matt’s work at www.mduttonart.wix.com/matthewdutton