The inspiration behind this collaboration was Rebecca Solnit’s “ A field Guide to getting Lost” in which never to get lost is never to live.

The premise is that as human beings  we are strengthened, enlarged, and built up by getting lost but consequently finding a way to return to the known state. The alternative is to lose the opportunity of those enhancements by never taking a risk. Those who never do may find life easy but will never be broadened or made strong by finding a  way to return. 

This is not about getting lost on a walk or around town but losing oneself. Solnit sees this as the way to finding love, inspiration, and wisdom through extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory.  And the role of the artist is to open doors, invite in the unknown, the unfamiliar. This echoes Keats concept of ‘negative capability’, a writer’s ability to accept uncertainty, mystery, doubt, without needing to seek fact and reason. 

The need for uncertainty can lead to safe, dull, predicable lives and so we lack the skills to be more optimistic about direction and meaning in our lives. Solnit notes the ancient explorers most important skills was a sense of optimism about surviving and finding a way. This positive aspect of losing oneself resonated both with Mathews and Ross as artists and as an antidote to the current zeitgeist.

We caught up with Mathews and Ross in their London Studio and asked how they went about visualising such a complex subject. The breakthrough came when their tutor, Jane Millar, suggested they each start a piece then exchange it. Each artist was free to re-arrange / develop the piece and then pass back for further work. In doing so Mathews and Ross were giving up ownership of the work This experimentation and increasing emphasis on process was reminiscent of Fluxus. 

So how did the artists respond to this approach? For Mathews the focus on process provided an unexpected relief from the burden of producing an end product. Mathews felt comfortable with the uncertainty of not knowing how or when a piece would come back from Ross. He was getting lost in the mysteries and uncertainty of the two-way process.

For Ross, the work exhibits elements of the state of being lost, confused, without a clear plan or route - but also it includes bright flashes and points of hope of returning to the known. There is a sense of enjoyment of  being lost, the different, and the unfamiliar - but there is also the tension of being reined in, constrained, tethered to the straightforward, the unchallenging. 

So, was the response to Solnit’s theory a success? While the initial plan was the focus on work that would reflect losing oneself, what happened was that the mysteries and uncertainties were more apparent and integral to the process.

Ross felt the making the work resulted in a ‘lost’ state for both of us for  a number of weeks during the project as we felt our way. The original premise was borne out by the extent to which each of us was at ease producing abstract pieces of random materials: one of us was happy, the other out of any comfort zone. But we continued to respond to one another’s work and found that we were inadvertently  exploiting the tension between our personal histories and approaches to life and our work.

A final quote from Benjamin Myers book, “The Offing”, p.26.

“Something drew me down the lane even though it had the appearance of leading to a dead end. This was to become one of those moments when life presents a new path whose importance may only be fully understood in years to come”