Inspirations

"The ideal rides ahead of the real, renewing beyond it, perishing in it--unreachable, surely, but made new over and over again just by hope and by the passage of time. What has not yet failed remains possible."

From A Place On Earth, by Wendell Berry

"To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it."

From "Healing" in the book What Are People For, Essays by Wendell Berry

Matthew's Bio

Matthew was born and raised in Oklahoma and the landscape of his childhood remains an important influence in his life. His sense of beauty developed in the absence of the grand and in the presence of the hidden, the subtle, the small. Matthew began turning in the early 1980's while working as a cabinet maker. He currently turns full-time at his home shop in Oklahoma City creating work primarily for galleries and invitational shows. His most recent shows include A Nation of Enchanted Form: Woodturning Artists Across North America and Contemporary American Woodturning Exhibition at the Rochester Art Center in Rochester, MN. Matthew has pieces in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu as well as in most major private collections in the United States.

Artist Statement

I hope my work possesses something of the wonder and inevitability found in a natural object; a weathered branch, a leaf, a seed, a stone. I hope it is both refined and organic, old and new, something made connecting with the created.

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