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Mataio Austin Dean | The Sailor's Stone, Halloween: London to Spithead

£200.00
Etching With Foul Biting/Distressed Ground On Paper
Edition of 50
Dimensions (WxH): 30 x 38cm

Born in 1996 to a Guyanese mother and an English father, and educated at the Slade School of Fine Art, Mataio Austin Dean is an artist from Portsmouth. His practice extends across visual art, poetry, music, and activism. He creates images, often intaglio prints, which explore, among other things, England and Guyana’s darkly intertwined histories: throwing light upon moments of resistance whilst unearthing stories of both coloniality and rebellion embedded in English landscape and architecture. Austin Dean probes the relationship between printmaking and orality, interrogating the temporality and political potency of images, symbols, and sigils. English and Guyanese oral cultures are at the heart of the work; reimagining, writing, and performing poetry and folksong breathes life into the printed image, corporealising the past whilst confronting the present. Austin Dean’s practice is research-driven, exploring Marxism as a framework for emancipatory praxis. Recently, he has worked with etching in combination with cartographic and diagrammatic methodologies, and hyper-local historical research, linking sites in London and the South of England to macro-systems of settler-colonialism, enslavement, ‘new’ imperialism, and financialised capitalism. He is best known for his work as part of the nine-piece folk group, Shovel Dance Collective.
Etching With Foul Biting/Distressed Ground On Paper
Edition of 50
Dimensions (WxH): 30 x 38cm

Born in 1996 to a Guyanese mother and an English father, and educated at the Slade School of Fine Art, Mataio Austin Dean is an artist from Portsmouth. His practice extends across visual art, poetry, music, and activism. He creates images, often intaglio prints, which explore, among other things, England and Guyana’s darkly intertwined histories: throwing light upon moments of resistance whilst unearthing stories of both coloniality and rebellion embedded in English landscape and architecture. Austin Dean probes the relationship between printmaking and orality, interrogating the temporality and political potency of images, symbols, and sigils. English and Guyanese oral cultures are at the heart of the work; reimagining, writing, and performing poetry and folksong breathes life into the printed image, corporealising the past whilst confronting the present. Austin Dean’s practice is research-driven, exploring Marxism as a framework for emancipatory praxis. Recently, he has worked with etching in combination with cartographic and diagrammatic methodologies, and hyper-local historical research, linking sites in London and the South of England to macro-systems of settler-colonialism, enslavement, ‘new’ imperialism, and financialised capitalism. He is best known for his work as part of the nine-piece folk group, Shovel Dance Collective.