ART CITIES:London-Mat Collishaw

An important member of the Young British Artists, Mat Collishaw creates work that confronts issues of moral ambiguity with formally stunning and alluring imagery. Coupling references to art history, literature and the Victorian era with modern imaging technology, the artist renders powerful images and objects that often re-contextualize the impact of traditionally disturbing and sinister subject matter.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mat Collishaw Archive

At once poetic and morbid, Mat Collishaw’s sculptures, installations and photo-based works expose elements of beauty within the darkest fantasies, blurring the lines between seduction and repulsion, observation and exploitation, reality and artifice. “Echolocation” a new outdoor projection by Mat Collishaw opens to the public on London. Excavating more than a millennium of local history, the eleven-metre-long, three-channel video installation is on view at the Undercroft, a long alleyway that runs between the river Thames and All Saints Church. Referencing the church’s heritage, bats and Eadweard Muybridge*, the specially commissioned work is the artist’s first permanent outdoor public art installation in the UK. The original chapel of All Saints Church was the coronation site of several Saxon kings including Athelstan, who was crowned the first king of a unified England in 925. The building survived Henry VIII’s reformation and saw the transformation of Kingston from scattered settlement to modern day town, but it was eventually replaced by All Saints Church. Collishaw drew on the chapel’s history to create a virtual version of the long-gone church using Lidar or laser scanning – a process that has parallels with the echolocation method used by bats. Using data gathered by Lidar; a method of measuring distances using a pulsed laser to construct a digital 3D representation of space, a virtual version of the church was created. The atmospheric 3D scans were assembled to create a film that vividly reveals the space and scale of the chapel. Projected onto a semi-transparent mesh the film has an ethereal quality, like a free-flowing X-ray of an unseen past, a ghostly palimpsest that interrogates the history of this ancient place. Kingston is a bat conservation area, and seven species have been recorded across the river in Bushy Park. Bats are harbingers of change but unlike the spectral recreation of the church and its Gothic interior – which is based on its actual architecture – the bats in the video are animations, a reference to the work of Eadweard Muybridge. The video is projected onto a semi-transparent fine mesh made from stretched fishing net. (Kingston’s coat of arm consists of three silver salmon on a blue ground, representing three fisheries that are mentioned in the Domesday Book, after which the town became known as Kyngeston super Tamisiam, after the Latin for sieve or filter.) This gives the images both depth and an ethereal quality like a free-flowing X-ray of an unseen past, a ghostly palimpsest that interrogates the history of this ancient place. Reflecting the shadowy visuals of the film, a soundscape composed of a single cello overlaid with a virtual choir, ambient sounds and the soft timbre of bats is an evocation of times past and the mysterious system by which bats navigate. Best experienced at dusk, Echolocation reveals the hidden history of this once sacred ground.

*Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first name Eadweard as the original Anglo-Saxon form of Edward, and the surname Muybridge, believing it to be similarly archaic.

Photo: Mat Collishaw, Echolocation, 2021, 3 channel video projection on Polypropylene Mesh, 1152cm x 287cm, Commissioned by Canadian & Portland Estates, Created in collaboration with Lorena Popovici, BA Digital Media: Creative Computer Graphics and Media Technology, Faculty of Science Engineering and Computing at Kingston University (bat animation) and Josephine Miller, BA Art Direction, Creative and Cultural Industries at Kingston School of Art (bat texturing), in conjunction with Studio KT1, Courtesy the artist and Jeff Moore

Info: 6 Riverside Walk, Kingston, London, 14/4/2021- , Days & Hours: Daily until 11pm