Smoke on the Water

You can decry the distracting power of Instagram all you like, but the platform does have a canny way of bringing people together, particularly those of a creative persuasion. Fine artist and illustrator John Booth met architect Mat Barnes on “the gram” after falling in love with pictures of the latter’s home in Cardiff, which Mat custom-designed and built to showcase his unique architectural sensibilities. After a volley of DMs and John’s repeated reassurance he wasn’t just loitering in Mat’s front garden, the pair became firm friends. And the friendship later grew into creative collaboration.

“It’s a nice house,” says John. “Right up my street. I think it’s quite radical.”

“And then you came to see it,” says Mat. “We realised we had this mutual appreciation for each other’s work and developed this very conversational relationship where we shared references with each other. We recently did a little swap where I got one of John’s vases and he got one of my chairs.” And then they started pitching for work.

Not all of their pitches came to fruition, but when NOW Gallery contacted John to offer him its annual design commission, he realised he’d found the perfect opportunity to work with Mat on a public project. “I didn’t want to just do something by myself,” says John. “I wanted it to be a shared venture.” So they got to work researching the history of the peninsula through the ages and its evolution from a boggy piece of riverside, to a vital industrial and maritime hub, right up to the present day.

“Then as we kept researching, this motif constantly reappeared. Chimneys, chimneys, chimneys. Domestic chimneys on top of redbrick terraced houses, tall industrial chimneys from when the area housed a gasworks, a big chimney-like structure from when they used to make giant telephone cables to cross the Atlantic — it felt like this architectural motif gave us a way to tell the story of Greenwich Peninsula through the ages.”

In their debut collaborative exhibition, Up In Smoke, the chimney takes centre stage in a vibrant, colourful and interactive installation that sees the gallery transformed into an evocation of the area’s domestic and industrial past and showcases the whole range of the pair’s skills. Mat has designed five chimneys from different periods of history which visitors to the gallery can climb over, move through and walk around, while John has created custom patterns and motifs to cover every available surface of the installation in vibrant colour, taking objects that may once have been banal and transforming them into eye-popping sets.

While the rationale for some creative collaborations takes time to reveal itself, with John and Mat the parallels in their practice are immediately clear. Both are celebratory in their use of colour, embracing decorative ornamentation and flourishes in contexts in which they would usually be overlooked. Mat’s architectural practice eschews modernist simplicity to allow for custom detailing that represents his clients’ personal interests and tastes, elevating form over function without ever sacrificing actual functionality.

John’s bold decorative motifs regularly adorn objects that are usually hidden in plain sight. A recent project saw him creating a set of five decorative urns for Farewill, a company that exists to destigmatise and simplify death. His collection was intended to bring the object out of hiding and encourage discussion of the person whose ashes rest within it.

While their sensibilities may be similar, their skillsets are wildly different, and the design of Up In Smoke offers both the opportunity to demonstrate their specialisms while pushing themselves out of their comfort zones. “It’s been a big, ambitious project,” says John.

“But because there’s two of us working on it and we have different skills, the work is very easily split,” says Mat. “We come up with the structures and John creates the look of them, but we’re in constant dialogue throughout the process.”

“We’re both working to our strengths,” says John, “but I’m not really used to working in 3D at this scale, so it is a bit of a learning experience for me.”

When we speak, Mat is in the weeds of designing the structures that will sit at the heart of the exhibition, adjusting his technical drawings and working closely with material producers to ensure that the forms are both structurally and environmentally sound. The materials used have all been carefully considered for their sustainability and ability to break down naturally once the installation has been dismantled—considerations that ought to be straightforward, but have become something of a headache.

By contrast John is determined not to constrain his creative freedom by planning his painting too much in advance. “I’m just figuring out that balance of detail and refinement but trying not to get in the way of that looseness and energy. It’s all going to be painted freehand in situ over a period of two weeks, so however much we plan it we’ll still have the opportunity to make it really bright and energetic.”

He holds up a painted tile to demonstrate the effect. It’s bright. It’s energetic.

“Chimneys might sound formal and historical,” John says, “but it’s going to be a really fun space to be in.”

Up In Smoke is on show at NOW Gallery from June 21 to September 22. nowgallery.co.uk