Matt Runkle

Matt Runkle
Cottage Grove, Oregon, USA

STATEMENT

I’m a writer who engages with visual and tactile practices in the service of narrative. I’m drawn to hybrid genres, to junk, to the book as a form, and to the space between text and image.

Although I work in several different media, I see them all as modes of writing. And when I say writing, I mean the building of narratives through assemblage of fragments. And when I say fragments, I mean the physical, the detritus that combines to form collage. But I also mean the conceptual, the attempted capture of a thought on a scrap of paper to be put in a drawer for later. When coming across that scrap again, how has its function evolved? It’s a contextual challenge. What kind of story does this thought want to build? Or rather what kind of story will welcome it? Or rather what kind of story will, through sheer juxtapositional force, accept this thought against better judgment and, as result of such counter-intuitiveness, flourish?

Because this process involves layering, tactility is important. Also, depth, or rather the illusion of depth, or rather the spaces that confuse dimensions. The book form, then, is ideal: the second dimension gives way to the third with each turn of the page, and the reader’s experience from start to finish takes place in the temporal fourth. And because my process relies on the scraps of narratives past (as is inherent in the process of collage), a tension forms between the transitory and the permanent.

BIO

Matt Runkle is a writer, cartoonist, book artist, and collagist. His collage work and writing practice are often interdependent; found images generate narratives and vice versa, as seen in stories included in his short fiction collection, The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales (2014, Brooklyn Arts Press) and published in BOMB. His artist book, Catholics, is a limited-edition memoir composed of drawings, collage, and letterpress-printed prose. It is included in permanent collections at the Library of Congress, the Newberry Library, Virginia Commonwealth University, and others. He has taught at venues including San Francisco Center for the Book, University of Iowa Center for the Book, University of Nevada–Reno, and Penland School of Crafts. His workshops often incorporate letterpress, zines, comics, sequential collage, and other modes of writing for visual and material genres. He serves as Executive Vice President of the College Book Art Association (CBAA) and lives in Oregon.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
matt-runkle.com

IMAGES