HERE TO BECOME 2023

Host by Patric Rogers (2023)

In summer 2023 alongside my fellow creatives Angelo Madonna, John Elcock and Silvia Battista we formed a co-operative art collective called Material Matters.

This exciting movement led to our first exhibition which took place in summer 2023 at Liverpool’s Bridewell Studios.

Our first exhibition together titled ‘Here to Become ‘featured as part of Liverpool International Biennial.

Host by Patric Rogers (2023) with Trinity by John Elcock (2023)

Queering The Cross by Silvia Battista (2023)

Visitors were invited to embrace the alchemical qualities of the material and the symbolic, weaved together into mythopoetics that are paradoxically both stable and mutable, human and more-than- human.

Angelo Madonna further explores his work on body-duality, his created forms presenting a kind of living alter-ego of the self: fragile works, that play with elemental forces of fire, water and air.

Also literally taking inspiration (‘re-spirare’ It.– departing, going, to breathe the last breath) from these forces, Silvia Battista invokes ritual practice to imagine a mythological, speculative fiction: centred on a series of works which powerfully and beautifully present an alternative semiotics.

Patric Rogers presents a startling geological examination of human identity, deconstructing the figure in 3D to argue for a re-appreciation of the contribution that landscape itself has on both our physical and spiritual manifestation.

John Elcock connects with and unifies our collective’s work with a kinetic sculpture whose enigmatic form, at giant scale, seeks to weigh human souls in a chilling metaphor for nuclear annihilation.

This show stemed from our shared connection to processes, questions and uncertainty, rather than a didactic of end-results and answers. Our artists look at change as a condition of life – as an infinite process of becoming, and we challenge the imposed addiction towards the new that neoliberal ontologies have impressed on our consciousness.

‘Here to Become’ was an Independents Biennial event responding to the theme of the 2023 Liverpool Biennial ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’ whose theme addresses the history and temperament of our city and its call for ancestral forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing.

Cherenkov by John Elcock (2023)

 ‘Falling diamonds are dancing on hot plates’ by Angelo Madonna (2023)       

Trinity by John Elcock (Here to Become 2023)