MATTHEW RICHARDSON – Biography
Matthew studied at Central St. Martins and UWIC Cardiff and lives in Norwich. He has an experimental and exploratory approach to making collage and illustration, drawing and distilling images that are graphic expressions of a particular idea. His process uses overlooked objects, images and chance discoveries to build unexpected visual spaces and narratives. He plays with how things fit, both practically and conceptually, by using visual metaphor and the symbolic power of images. Matthew is interested in how visual and written language is entwined, and has worked on a large project at the British Library, funded by the London Doctoral Centre, that explores new ways of approaching literary illustration by using writers’ original manuscripts as sources to create new visual poetry.
Matthew’s work has been used extensively across print, publishing and web. He has illustrated many books and book covers for publishers including Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Flammarion, Folio and Hutchinson. He creates regular editorial illustrations for clients such as The New Yorker, Tricycle Magazine, LA Times, The Economist, The Guardian and Harper’s. Notable projects have included the promotion of exhibitions and events for the V&A museum using their collection as source material, a campaign for the opera ‘Prince Igor’ at the ENO, and promotional imagery for the Poetry Society and the British Library’s ‘Discovering Literature’ microsite. Another project Matthew has illustrated is ‘Speeches of Note’ by Shaun Usher. This is a collection of diverse and historic speeches, which includes Tilda Swinton’s tribute to David Bowie and the African-American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass’ speech to the Rochester Anti-Slavery Society. He has also made two books for The Folio Society. The first is an illustrated edition of ‘The Outsider’ by Albert Camus, in which he recast a 1920s actor in the role of the outsider. The second is ‘In Praise of Folly’, a critique of society and a celebration of foolishness and mis-rule written in 1512 by Desiderius Erasmus, a humanist thinker and social commentator. Matthew re-invented the character of ‘Folly’ as a collage of Carmen Miranda, the Cat in the Hat and Malcolm McLaren.
As well as working with handcut and digital collage, Matthew’s processes also involve making, crafting and assembling in three dimensions, and he has recently been experimenting with form and decoration through hand built ceramics. Alongside working to commission for design, web and publishing, Matthew’s own assemblages, installations and moving image work have been shown in gallery and museum contexts, including Transition, The Beaney, g39, Kingston Museum, Safehouse 2 and Outpost.
Select Client List
Adobe, Ambit, British Library, Brown University, Cadbury, Channel 4, Deutsche Bank, The Economist, English National Opera, Editions Flammarion, The Folio Society, Google, Granta, The Guardian, Harper Collins, Harper’s Magazine, Editions Héloïse D’Ormesson, Hutchinson, LA Times, New Statesman, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Penguin, The Poetry Society, Quirk Books, Random House, The Royal Parks, Simon & Schuster, The Smithsonian Institute, The Times, Tricycle Magazine, Victoria & Albert Museum, The Washington Post, World of Interiors.