About Matthew Dommett

Matthew Dommett is a London-based artist and graduate of Central Saint Martins, MA Fine Art. Dommett has Aspergers, and incorporates this into his practice, exploring the difference between interpretations according to certain neurotypes. He makes irreverent, playful work that underlines the inherent problem that experience can only be communicated through reductive means.

Dommett’s practice gestures to the quasi-fictional nature of phenomena, considering our dependence on internal processes that both construct and distort experience. Through exploring the relationships between objects and experience, Dommett questions the capacities of communication and the role this plays in the construction of speculative history. In part, these interests have developed in response to the Romantic painter William Turner’s alleged act of tying himself to a mast during a storm, so that his work could express itself with sublime qualities. Dommett often seeks to charge objects with experiences so that he can see how such acts inform their phenomenological qualities, while also considering how this response is affected by the means of communication that limits experience to narrative. This enquiry is driven by research into the laws of sympathetic magic, semiotic theory, psychology, and philosophy.