matilde tomat
I work from within the mark. Not to represent, but to remember.
The body knows: it draws before it explains.
This image is not a portrait. It is a moment inside the process: layered, embodied, ongoing. Behind me: one of my large-scale works,
a piece about time, space turning into a place; about a trace.
In front: a self, motion and stillness, within and without; the threshold between thought and gesture, right before a leaving.
My practice lives here: in the loop, in the breath,
in the tactile knowing of hands before words.
Hands as Instruments of Knowing
These hands have drawn, carved, gathered, steadied; trembled.
They hold pens and stones with equal reverence. They touch the world not just to shape it, but to be shaped by it.
In a culture often disembodied, my work insists on return: to the hand, the nerve, the skin. To the felt experience of knowing.
Each gesture, each mark made, is an enquiry. A phenomenological provocation. A tracing of meaning not only in the mind, but through the body. This is practice as research. Not abstracted, but situated, rooted in flesh, in memory, in motion.
To touch is not merely to perceive; it is to participate.
before nothing
[Residency at The Crypt Gallery, London | February 2020]
This project unfolded at the cusp of silence, on the threshold of global stillness. Before Nothing was a three-day live drawing residency in the subterranean quiet of The Crypt: cold, damp, and utterly stripped of distraction. It became an excavation of what it means to create while being watched.
I was thinking about the tension between gazing and observing, especially where the gaze invokes shame, exposure, and the uncanny mirror of the Other. I was thinking about spectatorship, about the artist as object, about the slippage between the solitary act of drawing and its transformation into performance.
What happens when a deeply private act is made public? When the act of creation becomes spectacle?
I was the artist in the anthropogenic zoo, aware of my own visibility.
I was thinking on how my gestures might shift beneath the imagined eye of the viewer; of artistic pleasure, not just in making, but in being seen making; of the fictional self and the real hand, the mediated persona and the raw, immediate trace of charcoal on paper. This was an experiment in thresholds: between self and other, process and product, fiction and presence.
tâs
[installation | 2021]
From the Latin tacēre, tâs (intransitive, imperative, 2nd person singular) means “be quiet” in my native Friulian. But this is not a command. It is a calling-in.
Three white chairs. A wall marked only by a delicate tide of white slips of paper: all blank, all different. A congregation of silences. Each one, a gesture withheld.
This installation invites the viewer not only into contemplation, but into complicity:
it is a spatialised invocation to consider the internal acoustics of thought.
What is the shape of your noise? What is it that truly needs to be said;
and what, precisely because it matters most, resists being spoken?
There is here a phenomenology of restraint, an embodied invitation to absence, opacity, and refusal: not as nihilism, but as the most intimate form of presence.
In an age of over-disclosure, tâs becomes a radical imperative:
Do not speak. Sit with it. See what echoes.
caught in the act of drawing
[York Open Studios | April 2022]
Over two weekends, within the open framework of York Open Studios, I turned myself into both subject and spectacle: drawing large-scale pieces while being watched. This performative drawing practice explores the paradoxes of visibility and intimacy, of making while being made visible. What happens to the creative act [often private, even sacred] when it is observed? What shifts in the pulse of the gesture, in the line traced, when the body that moves is also a body on display?
The work sits at the intersection of psychogeography, embodiment, and performative enquiry. It touches on Lacan’s concept of the gaze and brushes against the edges of the Hawthorne Effect. Here, inspiration is not a private spark but a live transmission, vulnerable to interference and response. The viewer is both witness and participant, and the artist becomes, momentarily, both agent and artefact. The project is a meditation on artistic pleasure, separateness, and the raw transaction of being seen while making something that matters.
but only the ruining of the rain has heard [FW.75ed.p99]
[Final Degree Show | 2022]
In a room seemingly bare > a bench, a speaker, a blank white wall < the artist staged a durational act of listening. What played, on loop, was a two-hour spoken-word piece: not quite an audiobook, not quite a performance, but a murmuring mind, a house with its windows open. Inspired by the 100th anniversary of Ulysses (1922–2022), I rewrote Joyce’s odyssey from the inner world of an artist. Following the structure of the novel’s 18 episodes, I navigated my day: cutting paper, sketching, drinking, feeding cats, mumbling, singing, letting the quotidian rise to poetic myth.
This is not a reading of Joyce, but a living-with. Each sound [the clatter of scissors, the purring of Virginia and James (my cats), the fragments of internal monologue] becomes a layer in the palimpsest of creative existence. It's Joyce by way of Woolf, filtered through the hum of a studio, the ache of absence, and the hunger for meaning. The father is sought, the self is mapped, and time collapses into art.
“There is a bit of Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Archaeology; a tad of Analysis, and a lot of the Aethereal.”
So I wrote. This Venn diagram of A's is less a discipline and more a cosmology: one where to create is to commune, and to make is to meet the Maker. I found this to be filled with intimacy, intellect, and irreverence; a kind of ritual performance in absence, both devotional and mischievous.
encountering the divine in the act of drawing
[Practice-led MRes, YSJ | 2022–2023]
In this research, I set out to explore where my drawing practice meets the ineffable, that strange, sacred edge where making becomes an encounter. Rather than focusing on finished artworks, I developed a process-led methodology that treats drawing as an embodied, devotional act, something transmutative, almost alchemical.
Each session was followed by rigorous self-reflective journaling, drawing on tools like Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Jungian dream and shadow work, tarot, oracle cards, and Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, all supported by my own training as an existential psychotherapist.
This material, which I’ve called The Polyhymniades, honours Polyhymnia [muse of sacred hymns] and, by extension, the sacred gestures of writing, drawing, and even photography (from phōtós, light, and graphé, drawing). I aimed to trace the movement of the creative act itself and to situate it within a spiritual, mythopoetic, and psychological map.
Over time, I found that concepts like performativity and “being in the zone” didn’t quite capture what I was experiencing. Instead, materiality [the feel of paper, the resistance of graphite] pointed me towards alchemy, which offered a more fruitful framework. At the centre of it all, where artist, material, and work meet, something always slipped beyond definition. And rather than trying to explain it away, I chose to honour that mystery.
The Polyhymniades is presented in three parts: Writings, Images, and Video. The Writings are edited from my journals and notes, formatted to reflect their original size and flow. They include scribbles, tarot spreads, multilingual slips, and mistakes [all kept intentionally, to preserve the lived rhythm of the process]. I’ve left out citations to keep the voice authentic and immersive, though a reading list is included. The Images and Video capture the tactile dimension of the practice: gestures, textures, proximity, silence. Some sessions were accompanied by music, others were silent. All were solitary.
In the end, the work confirmed the presence of this non-dogmatic spiritual experience in my practice, and also its limits. There’s always something that can’t quite be held. This project doesn’t try to fix that. It simply sits with it.
A Life That Writes Itself
This grid is not a retrospective. It is not a tidy portfolio of outputs or a curated self. It is, instead, a constellation: fragments of a life lived as practice.
Here, nothing is separate. The drawing and the day. The book and the breath. The cats and the cards. The Post-it notes and the prayers. The journey and the journal.
My work resists containment in artefact or outcome. To speak of it is to speak of a life: a life arranged not in neat chapters, but in spirals, synchronicities, seasons. A drawing made in silence is echoed by a dream, which finds a line in a journal,
which leads to a library, which opens to a myth, which appears again in the tarot, which comes back in the studio as a gesture I do not understand until days later. Or even years!
This does not want to be an exhibition of “supporting materials.” This is the living archive of an ongoing inquiry.
This grid of images offers a glimpse into the ecology of my process, where artistic, therapeutic, spiritual, and domestic strands are not parallel, but braided.
To divide the artist from the practice, or the practice from the life, would be to miss the point entirely.
This is my studio. This is my home.
This is my research. This is my ritual.
This is the life that writes itself: one mark, one moment, one meandering at a time. This is paleophenomenology.
This grid is not documentation. It is evocation. A visual footnote to a life lived as research. An answer, perhaps, to the question: where does the work really happen?
Here, I say.
Here > in all of this.
a note on discrete links
I understand the assessment process specifies that only one page will be considered in full. With that in mind, I wish to clarify that the links below are not intended as extended reading or supplementary material, but are themselves part of this page > visual markers pointing outward, like portals or footnotes of a living, breathing practice. They are included not for depth but for context: as part of the atmosphere, the ecology, the future plans, and rhythm of this artist’s way of being in the world.