My friend Maria Stenfor’s new gallery has just opened in Kings Cross, and she is exhibiting the new work of an exciting young artist Matt Calderwood. I went down to see Maria, and the exhibition, last week.

I really enjoyed Calderwood’s work but unlike film or contemporary music, where I’m steeped in the culture and the language, with cutting edge art I’m flying blind – so I hope Maria will be my guide through the LDN art scene over the next few month, and that I get the chance to visit some cool East End artists’ studios, as well some more high-profile exhibitions, in the company of a real expert. – Simon

Over to Maria to describe Matt Calderwood’s new work:

This will be Calderwood’s first London-based solo show in three years, and a continuation of Matt¹s exploration of the turning point where power and strength flips into catastrophic failure. Often, the focus is on the point just before the crash when thought and suspense hang in the air. The gallery space will be divided into different sections and show installations of sculpture, video and photograms.

In the darkness of an improvised photographic darkroom a standard red wine glass is placed on a piece of photographic paper. It is stamped upon and smashed. Shattering across the paper, shards of glass cut and indent the paper, recording the violence of the action. The resultant mess is exposed with a camera flash and the developed image is a surprisingly photographic proof of the shattering. The OGlass photogram was shown for the first time in 1999 in ‘Contemporary Magazine’ as an artist project. Matt has revisited this work over the years since but this will be the first time it has been included in a solo exhibition.

Nine identical, large, black rubber objects are stacked like a puzzle, interlocking and tessellating in three dimensions, recalling minimalist sculpture by the likes of Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt and Tony Smith. The humorous and fetishistic associations of rubber and the transient nature of the resulting sculptures temper the apparent austerity of minimalism. Only when the rubber objects are placed and put together, working with the forces of friction and gravity, does the sculpture manifest itself. From a philosophical standpoint, we are ultimately dealing with the concept of power where power only exists when exercised against something (or someone) else, and underpinned by structural conditions. As an ongoing performative work, the sculptures will be dismantled and reconfigured at random intervals throughout the exhibition.

These works straddle the fine line implicit in the title of the exhibition. ‘Shatterproof’ is, on the one hand, robust and invulnerable to stress and, on the other, more tenuously, it could be evidence or proof of a shattering, a total collapse, and a failure. Glass versus boot.