Bio
Matt Leo Durrant is a visual artist who was born in Essex in the 1990s. Matt’s love for nature inspired him to undertake a degree in Ecology, where he invested a lot of his time helping to manage a conservation project in tropical forests in Africa.
Matt's photographs frequently link back to nature, but also to his own mental health to which photography has been an important tool for helping him to manage his OCD, which manifests itself in obsessive thoughts and rituals. In 2018, Matt's exhibition 'The Colour Jungle' was created in support for the Mental Health Foundation and featured images which directly reflected his own journey of transformation.
In 2019, Matt started to focus upon more black and white photography, where nature continued to be the main focus of his works, a place where he feels most grounded.
The process of photography is a powerful too in itself for self-reflection. From 2020, this has embedded itself in Matt becoming the main subject in his photographs. Some of the techniques he uses are inspired by the phototherapy techniques of Jo Spence and Rosy Martin and the performances of Marina Ambramovic. Although Matt acknowledges that his anxiety will never go away, he wants his photography to reflect his ever changing relationship changes with it, through the good and bad days, as a documentation of how this may be useful in helping him to further manage his own anxiety and to give him the confidence to talk further about it and inspire others.
CV
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2018 -
MA Photography, Falmouth University
Selected Exhibitions:
2020
Landings:2020, Falmouth University
2019
RA Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts
2018
The Colour Jungle, Camden Image Gallery
Visible Light and Colour, Menier Gallery
Symbiosis, Espacio Gallery