15 MARCH 2013 - 23 JUNE 2013
Matt Calderwood (born in 1975 in Northern Ireland) is known for his often perilous performances, sculpture and film works. Calderwood's carefully controlled sculptures rely on counterbalance and friction to keep them steady, transforming everyday household items such as buckets, wine glasses, basketballs, shovels, into something extraordinary and seemingly close to collapse.
For his solo exhibition at BALTIC 39, his first in a public gallery in the UK, Calderwood will create a series of ambitious new sculptures which explore decaying and collapsing systems and the impact of environment and process on simple everyday materials. Made of fragile, degradable materials and interlocking elements, the works will be installed on the gallery’s roof terrace where they will weather and decompose, their delicate surfaces recording their exposure and deterioration. They will then be dismantled and reassembled over the course of the exhibition. Calderwood will also present a site-specific sculptural video installation showing new and recent films, each documenting a performance in which the artist experiments with balance, tension, instability and risk.