For artist Matthew Wilson, relocating from Belfast to Falmouth University in Cornwall for the 2025 Freelands Studio Fellowship has invited a new dialogue between landscape, material, and practice. Drawn to the Cornish environment, Matthew's growing artistic practice collects, breaks down, and reassembles materials from the landscape to explore processes of accumulation and transformation. Within Falmouth University’s studios and workshops, this approach has expanded into new forms of making and reflection, supported by the technical expertise and critical insight of the staff and mentors around him. The Fellowship offering both time and structure to experiment, to rebuild a studio practice from the ground up, and re-engage with the physical and conceptual dimensions of his work.
Sharing space with students has created an exchange that blurs the lines between teaching, conversation, and collaboration. Informal encounters and studio visits have shaped new ideas, while mentorship from curators and artists across Cornwall has connected Matthew to the region’s wider ecology. Immersed in a place with such a strong history of artists responding to landscape, the Fellowship has allowed the artist to reflect on his own position within that continuum – using the year to slow down, test ideas, and reimagine what it means to make art in relation to place.