In the sweet haze of seaside nostalgia lies a political history. Matthew Dowell has spent his Work/Leisure time with Abingdon Studios, researching the union campaigns for paid holidays; exploring and comparing the visual language of the campaign for leisure and the seaside leisure itself.

Dowell has split his time in residence between visits to archives across the country and site visits to take and understand the contemporary seaside landscape of Blackpool.

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Matthew Dowell (b.1994, Sunderland, UK) has a research based practice working across the expanded fields of print, performance, and sculpture. He is interested in how we define and occupy a place; responding to specific sites and objects, they adopt anthropological models of working through exploring social histories and recording signifiers of place: street and welcome signs, mapping and ephemera. He works with these signifiers as vessels of memory and aides to storytelling.

You can find out more about Matthew’s work here: https://matthewdowell.com/