After post graduate study at the Slade Matthew Tickle worked in Shoreditch and Hackney with the artist-led project Space Explorations. During the early 1990’s the group made large scale temporary sculptural installations in unused and derelict spaces. The afterlife of these interventions as photographic documentation underlies the artists continued interest in the implications of image capture. Since 1995 Matthew Tickle has been represented by Matt’s Gallery London.
Almost something from nearly nothing, the 2004 work, What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for sampled particles of background radiation with Geiger Counters realizing each detection as a flash of strobe light. Flashes emanating from one hundred rooms on the campus of Queen Mary Collage in Mile End East London punctured the night with startling subliminal images of the building’s interior spaces. The work was entirely without structure but the mind was nonetheless drawn into constructing rhythmic patterns from an aggregate of random events. The strobe flashes had a ghostly character striking but without report, noiselessly flitting, punctuating the backdrop to the busy city street saturated with the light and sound of human activity.
What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for was the antithesis of photography, entirely in the moment it made something invisible visible – instantly vanish. It was also extra-human, being a series of electromagnetic interactions seeded by an utterly random agent.