The Lost Object

Artist The Lost Object (Hyland Mather) works with discarded and abandoned materials to create a kind of collaborative ‘art’ work with time and nature.  He calls the products of this process ’lost objects’, often these ‘lost objects’ take the form of assemblage art.  

Junk, trash, ruins, rubble - anything that’s visually and imaginatively magnetic to him.      

The Lost Object lives in Amsterdam most of the time. It’s a city of bikes, and he rides by a dozen piles of trash on his bike every day: a rusty red triangle from an old metal desk, a sexy old wooden headboard, a pile of floor boards, crushed kitchen cabinets, an old mattresses…. He finds beauty in just the pile of junk as it lays. Pile porn.  

He uses a zen-like approach to ‘lost object’ making, searching for balance and harmony.  He’ll use what there is near him, no matter where he is.  It doesn’t matter what materials are available, the materials inform the outcome.  

The Lost Object has also made huge installations by taking a massive pile of junk he’d find on the ground, and rearranging that same junk into a work of art on the wall. He’d make work from the rubble of destroyed buildings, from washed up beach junk, from broken windows, from thrown away books. And he’s made huge painted murals with only ‘lost’ paint.   

Aesthetically, The Lost Object’s interested in shape, form, color, and composition. Almost all of what he currently makes is abstract and geometric, though he has several smaller series that delve into illustration as well.