San Francisco Chronicle 4

Matthew Picton: Fictional Perspectives: Paper sculpture

July 2013

Ambitious artists in every discipline face the difficulty of working something of the world into what they make. Some years ago, London-born Oregonian Matthew Picton resorted to maps as a solution.

His new work at Toomey Tourell continues to expand on the idea of a map as a footprint of history, not merely of a locale.

In recent years, as in the work on view, Picton has taken to rendering whole blocks or sections of city in aerial view. In “London 1940 — Clerkenwell” (2013) and other pieces here, he has formed upright paper shapes into equivalents of city blocks or standing structures.

In this piece, Picton has characteristically singed the paper cityscape, as a reminiscence of damage done to London during Hitler’s yearlong blitzkrieg bombing campaign. A bomb census kept during the war recorded every air raid’s effects.  Read more…