Anna Matthew

About

Anna Matthew is a ceramic and fibre artist from Vancouver, Canada. She feels most at home in the forest, surrounded by the towering trees of the Pacific Northwest. ​

The Portrait of the Artist is Her Mother – 2024/25

Working with clay and fibre I have explored the world of embodied language. This work looks at what it means to live with grief, mental illnesses, and chronic pain. 

Our bodies require us to express thought for it to be processed. It’s the reason why therapy helps, or talking to a friend, or journaling. We need our thoughts to become removed from our body to read them. Language is a way for us to see ourselves as much as it is to communicate with others. After processing wool I began to realign the fibres into long hand-spun threads, capturing thought within and creating a language beautifully truthful, embodied, and intuitive.

Beyond trying to understand and quiet the chaos in my mind, I wanted to allow my body to rest. I wanted to build something that held my body. So I created multiple vessels and a chair as they are both vessels for breath and the body.

This body of work has allowed me to process some of the chaos in my mind, pulling strands of fog from my brain as I twist and turned them into material, turning particles into vessels for my body. I created my space of shadows.