Matt Anstis is a London-born art historian and curator, specialising in Japanese and Korean material culture from the pre-modern, to the contemporary. Graduating with an MA in History of Art and Archaeology of East Asia from SOAS (University of London), Matt’s research interests include restaurants in Edo woodblock prints, Heian paper craft and Buddhist indigo sutras.As an amateur photographer and artist, his inspirations are contradictory: the constructed world, death and the supernatural, intense light and vivid colour, and dark, gothic monochrome. Inspiration comes from Victorian cemeteries, 19th century collodion prints and supernatural fiction, the writing of EM Cioran and Yukio Mishima, the collections of the British Museum, death metal and Wedgwood.Notable projects include the Koestler Trust’s display for HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs in 2019, working on the Koestler exhibition I’m Still Here in 2018, and the Barbican’s exhibition Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics in 2017.
ARTIST COLLECTIVE BM
‘It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform.’
_____John Steinbeck
The British Museum is a space that surrounds you
with narratives of history, culture and humanity from all over the world. You
are surrounded by us too, members of staff who are exceptional artists and
great minds. When we are not working our full-time jobs in the Museum, we
deserve to be seen (as such).
We wear a black, unobtrusive uniform, that makes differentiating ourselves as individuals and creatives difficult. Once we step out of our stifling shirts, loosen our neckties, we actively become artists, curators, designers, writers and photographers. This change isn’t just physical, we transcend from being indiscernible shadows, to beings brimming with the energy to create.
The aim of this collective, is to promote the artists that cannot afford to practice full-time, whose talents are fascinating, the very reason we admire each other and have united as a group. This is a significant way that we can create our story. We are artists from around the world, who come from different cultures with different ways of life, we find different ways expressing ourselves through art. But we have the same feelings and concerns, under the same roof, that of the British Museum.
Has working in the British Museum inspired or affected the way that you look at, or make art now? Let’s build a monument to our own talents, to stand amongst those that continue to inspire us all.
We wear a black, unobtrusive uniform, that makes differentiating ourselves as individuals and creatives difficult. Once we step out of our stifling shirts, loosen our neckties, we actively become artists, curators, designers, writers and photographers. This change isn’t just physical, we transcend from being indiscernible shadows, to beings brimming with the energy to create.
The aim of this collective, is to promote the artists that cannot afford to practice full-time, whose talents are fascinating, the very reason we admire each other and have united as a group. This is a significant way that we can create our story. We are artists from around the world, who come from different cultures with different ways of life, we find different ways expressing ourselves through art. But we have the same feelings and concerns, under the same roof, that of the British Museum.
Has working in the British Museum inspired or affected the way that you look at, or make art now? Let’s build a monument to our own talents, to stand amongst those that continue to inspire us all.