I’m a writer, photographer and walker
exploring landscape, perception and memory.

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Poetry Book!

Optic Nerve

Optic Nerve

Optic Nerve, my first collection of poetry, was recently published by Brick Books!

The overlap between what we see and how we write, process, and feel occupies Newfoundland artist and author Matthew Hollett’s playful, smart new collection of poems […] Optic Nerve looks inside things as varied as eyeballs (naturally), quarks, street art, and potatoes, and in Hollett’s hands, each act of looking becomes a meditation, not silent and solemn but riotous and vibrant, with the excitement of catching a glimpse of beauty through a keyhole.

Get Optic Nerve

Optic Nerve Broadside


Recent Projects

Distancing on the Lachine Canal

Distancing
on the Lachine Canal

A visual essay about walking the Lachine Canal in Montréal during the early days of the pandemic, as winter dwindled away into a strange new world.

Visit Distancing


Between Seasons on the North Head Trail

Between Seasons on the North Head Trail

A visual essay about walking the historic North Head Trail in St. John’s, Newfoundland. A year of fog, freezing rain and foxes, chronicled in 3000 words, 50 photos and a song.

Visit Between Seasons


Album Rock, cover

Album Rock is a work of creative nonfiction and poetry, inspired by a strange photograph made by Paul-Émile Miot in the 1850s. It was published in 2018 by Boulder Books.

Miot’s photo shows four French sailors posing on a boulder, having written the word “ALBUM” on it in large letters. The photographer intended to use it as the cover of an album of Newfoundland photos.

I was intrigued by Miot, a French naval officer who spent several years patrolling the French Shore. As an amateur photographer, he was one of the first people to see Newfoundland through a camera.

A friend and I travelled across Newfoundland to the place where the photo was taken – Sacred Bay, on the tip of the Northern Peninsula.

The book intertwines this road trip with my other attempts to unravel Miot’s complicated legacy. Along the way, I found some wonderful things in archives. It’s a very visual book!

Album Rock

A book about Paul-Émile Miot, one of the first photographers to visit Newfoundland.

Part art history, part road trip, and part detective story, Album Rock began when Matthew Hollett stumbled across an intriguing photograph from the 1850s. A lively and insightful work of creative nonfiction and poetry, the book explores the power of naming in shaping our perceptions of a place … It’s also a celebration of curiosity and the joy of delving into the mystery of a peculiar photograph.

Buy Album Rock



Recent Publications

Hard Ticket: New Writing Made in Newfoundland

Hard Ticket

My short story “The City Wears Thin” is included in Hard Ticket: New Writing Made in Newfoundland, edited by Lisa Moore. Available from Breakwater Books, 2022.

Best Kind: New Writing Made in Newfoundland

Best Kind

My essay “Painting the Curlew” is included in the anthology Best Kind, edited by Robert Finley. Available from Breakwater Books, 2018.


Selected Projects

Al Purdy A-frame Residency

Al Purdy A-frame Residency

In April and May 2023 I was writer in residence at the Al Purdy A-frame in Ameliasburgh, ON, where I spent time working on a new collection of poems.

Arteles Residency

Arteles Creative Centre is near Hämeenkyrö, Finland. The site used to be a school (its most famous alumni is Frans Eemil Sillanpää, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature). It’s now used for artist residencies.

I spent a month here along with a dozen other writers and artists from all over the place. We worked on our various projects and collaborations, explored the surrounding farmland and forests, drank way too much coffee, and tried sauna and salmiakki ice cream.

I made macro photos of lichen and moss, went on many long walks, read Tove Jansson’s short stories, and worked on some poems and a novel. This is reindeer lichen, which I’ve always known as “caribou moss.”

In the woods I came across a strange phenomenon called “hair ice,” which is caused by a fungus in dead wood that prevents ice from recrystallizing. Finland is magical. I loved my time at Arteles – apply for one of their residencies!

Arteles Residency

In November 2019 I participated in Enter Text, a writing+art residency at Arteles Creative Centre in Finland.

Landfall Residency

I gave a poetry reading at Brigus Public Library as part of the residency. I read from Optic Nerve, a collection of poems about photography which won the 2017 NLCU Fresh Fish Award.

 Landfall Residency

Kent Cottage is a registered heritage structure overlooking the town of Brigus, Newfoundland. It was famously inhabited by Rockwell Kent, and artist Jake Folensbee set up Landfall Trust to preserve the property.

 Landfall Residency

The tiny, rustic cottage is full of Jake Folensbee's paintings. It’s entirely off-grid, with a furnace, limited electricity (from solar panels), and water from a nearby stream. It’s a lovely, charming, strange, slightly spooky place.

 Landfall Residency

Overlooking the beautiful town of Brigus, Landfall is a quiet, secluded place to write and walk. I worked on some new poems, and finalized my manuscript for Album Rock. I feel really lucky to have spent time here.

Landfall Residency

As part of the 2018 Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing Award, I spent two weeks writing in historic Kent Cottage in Brigus, Newfoundland.

A House By the Water

A House By The Water is an exhibition of work I made during a summer residency at The Rooms in St. John’s. I set out to explore the changing architectural landscape of Newfoundland. How has the way people inhabit the island changed, and what does this reveal about our relationship to it? How does the history of a place change how we see it?

A digital projection shows lavish suburban homes tumbling into the ocean, one after another. These kinds of houses have sprung up all over the island, occupying hillsides, jostling for the best view. They often seem comically oversized, almost surreal, as if they’re meant to be somewhere else. Dream homes.

Dwall consists of beachworn bricks suspended in midair. In making this piece, I’d set out to find an artifact that had been eroded by the water, some evidence of a lasting architectural presence or authenticity. As it turns out, these bricks are not very old, dating from the Smallwood era, but they’re already falling apart, clay crumbling back into earth.

I came across the word dwall in Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, where Smallwood says “to dwall was to spend a night neither asleep nor awake, but somewhere in between. I at last had a single word to describe how I almost always slept.” Dwall, to me, suggests an intentional unconsciousness, an understanding while pretending not to understand, which is perhaps a common strategy when coping with drastic change.

I began to realize that my project wasn’t about houses, but the space between the houses, their relationship to each other and the surrounding land. It was about communities, sustainability, potential futures. It’s about how building patterns and desires reflect larger societal changes. It’s about small moments, like light glinting off waves, and larger concerns, like rising ocean levels.

In the video A City By The Sea, light glittering in ocean waves takes the shape of tiny houses. When making this work I was thinking about older ways of building on the land. Rural vernacular architecture has a kind of lightness, as described by Robert Mellin in Newfoundland Modern: Architecture in the Smallwood Years…

“The houses and outbuildings of Newfoundland’s numerous coastal settlements had a temporary, fragile, and even nomadic character in form, construction, materials, and use, requiring frequent maintenance, rebuilding, and relocation. Many of these buildings appeared to perch tentatively on the land without changing it, leaving no traces when they were moved or abandoned.”

A single photograph, Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (after Hokusai), bridges this installation work with my practice of walking, writing and making photographs. I often work with computers and code, but my thinking patterns are discursive, drawn from wandering and finding things. A House By The Water was at The Rooms from Oct. 2015 – Jan. 2016, and the projections were shown in the 2017 Bonavista Biennale.

A House By the Water

A solo exhibition of video and installation work at The Rooms in St. John’s, exploring the changing architectural landscape of Newfoundland. 2015. Mary MacDonald kindly wrote about this exhibition.

Field Notes

Field Notes is a book of photos and poems about writing outdoors, and explores symmetries between human relationships and the connections we develop with landscape and place. It’s a self-published artist’s book. I received a Professional Project Grant from ArtsNL to work on this project.

The brief passages of Field Notes suggest distance and longing. They are about relationships, in an ambiguous way: a distant friend, a long-lost lover, a cherished place. They share an anonymity with messages scrawled on highwayside stones, declarations of love carved in treebark, or postcards found in a curiosity shop.

This project originated with some earlier experiments. A few years ago, walking in Point Pleasant Park, I found a seagull feather. I dipped it in seawater and wrote with it on a rock, the first phrase that came to mind: i miss you more on cloudy days. I photographed the words as they evaporated.

Later I made another of these, spelling out with fragments of seaweed: why am i not surprised. I left the words for the wind to disassemble. I called these gestures Field Notes, and wrote a poem to accompany each.

A video from this project was screened as part of Eastern Edge Gallery’s Wade In video series.

Field Notes

Photos and poems about writing outdoors, exploring symmetries between human relationships and the connections we develop with landscape and place. 2014.

Small Landmarks

Small Landmarks is a synthesis of photography and notebook writings, a visual journal of walking and thinking. The work is about finding things, making connections, stringing small moments together into something more.

The pages contain photographic diptychs paired with handwriting from my notebooks. The book itself is loosely structured around places I’ve lived: western Newfoundland, Halifax and Montreal.

Small Landmarks is assembled from an archive of eight years of photos and field notes about walking and seeing.

I originally designed this book for iPads and sold it through Apple Books, but it’s no longer available for sale. Get in touch if you’d like a PDF!

Excerpts from Small Landmarks were published in the Spring 2015 issue of Riddle Fence, along with an essay by Craig Francis Power which touches on the work.

Small Landmarks

A visual journal about finding things, making connections, stringing small moments together into something more. 2013.

Collaborations

The Garbage Poems

The Garbage Poems

Anna Swanson’s The Garbage Poems is a series of poems written entirely with words found on garbage she collected at swimming holes. I created an interactive version of the project that pairs the poems with April White’s watercolours, as well as a constrained writing tool that lets readers compose their own poems.

Visit The Garbage Poems

Tea Ceremonies

Tea Ceremonies is a collaboration between myself and book artist Marlene MacCallum.

Marlene’s images are printed in photogravure and lithography, and the text is printed in letterpress.

It’s a hand-bound accordion artist’s book (edition of 20), with folded paper cover and wrapper.

Tea Ceremonies

Marlene MacCallum made this artist’s book in response to my essay about tea. Marlene’s photographs are polymer gravures, and the text is printed in letterpress. Tea Ceremonies won an Alcuin Society Award, and is available for purchase.

In 2020, Marlene and I collaborated on Shadows Cast and Present, an interactive digital version of one of her artist’s books.

Topiary

Topiary

April White and I wrote some funny, folky songs about snails and whales, and recorded an album as Topiary. This was for the RPM Challenge – you can read more about it in The Overcast.