Over the last few years, David has been collecting vintage Scottish Bluebell matchboxes in order to create miniature seascapes. Wooden inserts are cut from old skirting-boards, floorboards or other offcuts from around the studio; they’re sanded and then painted in gouache in three or four layers. They rest inside the matchbox drawers, as vessel or as frame. Handheld, pocket-sized fragments of ocean. Each painting is unique, responding to the colouring and age of the box.
“[Cass uses] old matchboxes as a convenient mini-machine of moving parts, in which card, paper, ink, and watercolour can transform a small quotidian design marvel into a vessel of succinct communication, by which opposites are made into a whole: waves of water on a fire-making device, an almost-obsolete, once common convenience made into a reminder of our present-day plight.” — Patricia Emison
