Mat Collishaw Research and Analysis

Mat Collishaw is an artist who strives to combine nature with a dark twist on life. In his “Insecticide” body of work, he shows nature destroyed and juxtaposes the idea of life and death in an imaginative way.

Mat Collishaw

“Insecticide 24”

2008

Photograph

182 x 182cm

His technique for this photo was to crush certain aspects of nature, in this case dead butterflies and layer and compose them in a way that gives depth and matches his deep thoughts about the matter of life and death. Although this is a print of his work, the layering of the wings and bodies of the butterflies increases the form and shows destruction of life in multiple ways.

The different textures and patterns adds contrast to the piece and helps show all the different forms of destruction of beauty in the world. The contrasting colours of the blue and yellow indicates the idea of juxtaposition and matches his concept all together. For instance, where yellow meets blue, where warm meets cold, where life meets death. I believe that the fact that he has placed his work onto a pitch-black background shows how all life is actually surrounded by darkness, however I am more focussed on life rather than death in my work, which is why I would use an opposing colour to black, such as white.

As far as composition can be discussed, I think that he centralised his work in the frame to present the idea of nature and life being the epicentre of death and destruction and how devastation will eventually consume all life and nature.

Towards the beginning of my personal investigation, I placed my hybrid animal photos onto texturized boards and I really think that I could create similar experiments with natural materials, like the board with the owl hybrid. This will link to my current work as I am focussing on a butterfly and human; I will be able to use my current experiments as inspiration to maybe create backgrounds that would suit the photos for my final outcome. 

Overall, I really like Collishaw’s work, in particular this piece, as he manages to portray nature in a unique way that hasn’t been shown before. However, he focuses on death more than life, whereas for me I would most likely want to illustrate life more than death. Due to the difficulty of finding and using dead insects for my work, I think that it may be useful to use other natural sources of materials. For example: leaves, grass, bark etc.