‘Carpet Python: connector and healer’ – Matt Ottley – the bid is at $275

After living numerous tumultuous lives with a good mix of pain and ecstasy in each, multimodal artist Matt Ottley has found himself living and creating, alongside his artist partner, in a stone cottage located on a mountain peak somewhere in Northern New South Wales.

In the calm of his home, Matt’s brush strokes are accompanied by the chatter of birds and the murmurs of the rainforest outside.

The sounds of nature have been a recurring feature in Matt’s life. From a young age he would listen for the call of the blue bird of paradise and play with his pet tree kangaroo Penny in the small town of Mount Hagen located in PNG, where he lived until age 12.

He longed more than anything to join these birds in flight. ‘I spent hours crafting wings out of sheets and bits of wood and then a few painful hours jumping off the tank stand to test them out,’ he said. ‘Kind of weird considering I now have a fear of heights.’

Though Matt’s wooden wings didn’t bring him closer to his goal of flight, he seems to have realised a different intrinsic link with birds, that being through his love of music. Matt finds beauty and joy in music from Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony to the Melanesian music he grew up hearing.

He says of his childhood self, ‘Two things – I longed to make music and I was obsessed with birds.’

He reflects fondly on roaming the bush and constructing treehouses and kites, toying with different shapes and materials for hours. He envisioned his kite getting struck by lightning with a measure of anticipation and excitement.

After growing up with bipolar 1 paired with synaesthesia at a time when mental health was desperately misunderstood, and beginning his journey as a stockman at age 17, wrangling bulls in the wild NSW countryside, this seems to be the one excitement that Matt was spared.

Matt mentions some of his favourite pieces of media, including ‘Thunderclap’ by Laura Cumming, ‘The Book of Everything’ by Guus Kuijer and Disney’s original ‘Fantasia’ film. Matt’s love of ‘Fantasia’ seemed significant to me, both the orchestral score and the somewhat psychedelic use of colours and shapes seemed relevant to the neurological condition of Synesthesia.

Matt is open about how his conditions have given him a unique perspective. Even amidst terrifying manic episodes, when losing the ability to understand speech, colours and shapes would emerge and swirl, seeming to reconcile pain with beauty.

Matt has written and/or illustrated many books, often touching on neurodivergence, but ‘The tree of ecstasy and unbearable sadness’ seems to characterise these oscillations best.

The metaphor of a boy with a tree growing inside him bearing flowers of ecstasy but also fruits of sorrow and desolation, encapsulates this duality.

Tying all highs and lows together for Matt, is art in all its forms. ‘Art means everything,’ he said.

‘It is the thing that literally keeps me sane. In a world tearing itself apart with hatred and greed, art sometimes feels like the only redeeming virtue of humanity.’

One of Matt’s greatest aims is to facilitate understanding and empathy, for those living with mental health conditions, through his work. He also seeks to give audiences the same enriched sensory experience he exists within, now having scored many of his own books in a series titled ‘The Sound of Picture Books’.

Through this endeavour he has worked with musicians and orchestras across Australia and internationally.

Matt’s artworks are arresting and expansive, being very technically impressive as well as steeped in layers of meaning. Every element has something to say.

In an interview for Eerdlings, he mentions the painting ‘A Girl Asleep’ by Johannes Vermeer stirred this notion in him that every part of an artwork could speak to the story.

Details matter to him. When he and Isobelle talked about the name for his kite and were considering names, Matt explained that he had painted the snake in the particular position it was in to suggest the universal shape of the snake icon that symbolises medicine and healing.

‘The carpet snake is called Gabul in the Bundjalung language, and Gabul represents the connector of people and place in Bundjalung culture,’ he said.

For this reason he considered calling it,  ‘Gabul: connector and healer,’ then  ‘Carpet snake: strength and healing,’ before finally settling on its current title.

As a result, his artworks are often infused with metaphor and contrast – a small child beside a huge, muscular bull, a baby in pink cradled by an electric blue snake. To this end, Matt also employs warped perspectives to convey particular emotions.

Notably, his childhood desire for a bird’s-eye view, also returns, with many striking oil paintings of dramatic cloudy skies. Examples of these two things can be seen in ‘How To Make A Bird’, made in collaboration with Meg McKinley.

Matt is prolific and wildly diverse, possibly one of the virtues of his neurodivergence, and so he gives a slightly intimidating run down of his current exploits. ‘I’m working on my second symphony, I’m about to begin writing a double concerto for violin, piano and orchestra, I’m writing a novel and I’m also performing medieval and renaissance music with a fellow musician.

‘Doing the odd painting as well…’

As he works on this current project of hope, his kite taking shape, he mused on his own hopes: ‘I would love to see people become kinder and gentler…capable of having a respectful, loving conversation about these things [religion, living within our means] without people becoming reactive and angry. Humanity has been expressing its anger towards each other for 15000 years, enough is enough!’

by Adelaide Štolba.