It started as a conversation about metaphysical philosophy, sculpture and how to display an object.  Somewhere between then and now it grew legs and eyes and a mouth and started asking questions that resist being answered. In Nirvanamatopoeia Matthew Bennett Laurents and Jeremy Le Grand are playing, making and seeing how a slight gesture can grow into something more. How it can zig and zag and travel a continuum of form, color and pattern, only to spring up from the hard concrete and multiply. How at the intersection where free association and material process meet, our creations can take on a life of their own. And how the first step is inextricably connected to the last. Sometimes the things we make are not ours, but a part of an existence that evades understanding; sometimes they’re just the things we make.    

Matthew Bennett Laurents graduated with an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Studio Art from Lewis & Clark College.  Drawing on histories of craft and ritual, his work explores the potential of objects as vessels for spiritual and emotional energy.  He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Jeremy Le Grand is an artist and fabricator living and working in Portland, Oregon. He’s interested in pattern, craft, materiality, and the capacity for finding significance in the arbitrary.