Knick Knacks is Matthew Darbyshire proposal for the Fourth Plinth public art program in Trafalgar Square, London. The concept builds on an image designed by the artist himself as a christmas card for "The Guardian" newspaper and wants to transform the monumental sculptural base in a shelf that refers to a domestic space. Here Darbyshire presents eight sculptures in coloured polyurethane foam, reproductions of household objects in a different scale. The eight opaque elements would be 3D scanned and modeled from the original objects, CNC routed in polyurethane foam and then laminated in fibre-glass before being chromed, sprayed and flocked. The single clear element would be modeled in much the same way but then cast in clear tinted resin.
This installation is a reflection on two feelings which are deeply contemporary, "emptiness"  and "nostalgia", and in particular a nostalgia that is expressed through reproductions of objects than - in respect to the original ones  - try to mask some of the values that were in present and that remain somewhat hidden below the reproductions’ surface: “From the pop to the patriotic and the colonial to the kitsch”. A composition which could be read on different levels and which presents different layers, which could appear simply ironic but actually refers to some unsettling aspects of the British national identity through "a sort of ‘seduction and repulsion’ mechanism with its critique buried safely beneath the surface
The project was not selected for the commission.
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CAPTCHA is the project for a sculpture that reproduces a sports car  - a Mercedes SL600 - through layers of transparent polycarbonate, and should have been installed inside the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The project, which focuses on the “striking formal aspects” of such a sculpture in a specific historical context, can be considered alongside Matthew Darbyshire works and researches on the optical potential of different materials and manufacturing processes, many of which looks at the printing technologies and the three-dimensional modeling of the prototypes used in the automotive industry. The polycarbonate in particular has different reactions to the light, and would allow the sculpture to "oscillate between the transparent and the opaque, or the solid and the empty". Even the choice of the subject can be included in the poetic and the iconography of Darbyshire, as it remains suspended between an intrinsic and ironic social commentary and a formal reflection on the object, the luxury, and its symbolic and subjective values.
The FIAC Committee rejected the project, which should have been also supported by the Swarovski company, within the off program of the fair. However the artist was asked if he would make and install it anyway with his commercial galleries resources.
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This project was submitted as a proposal for the soft play commission at the Abbey Leisure Centre in Barking, London. The elements present in the area, dedicated to the children, are a series of games and spaces reinterpreted following the forms of objects, furniture and particular details of urban furniture. The space is divided into three floors: the ground floor is characterized as a urban public space with a trompe l'oeil painting of a Woolworths shop, a vinyl flooring that reproduces a grey stone paving, a neon sign and a coffee area, while the first and the second recall domestic spaces. Inside the drawings for the project we can find the model of a Volkswagen New Beetle car which works as a children picnic table, a climbing tree, a "store" where children can throw down huge objects made of a soft material and an area where rubber balls come out of bathtubs and sanitary fittings, a rotating wheel that looks like a sofa with a coffee table, a double bed you can jump on avoiding huge swinging lamps and the passages between different levels, made of firefighters poles, ramps and shelves to climb.
The Committee discarded the proposal, in favour of one by Marvin Gaye Chetwynd.
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Mojo is a project for the Fosters & Partners designed Bloomberg headquarters at 50 Finsbury Square, London, and consists of banners and an interactive space.
A first intervention would "reproduce" inside the atrium of the commissioner’s London headquarters the central courtyard of one of the most famous and poor social housing estate in London, Pembury Estate, which is located in Hackney and results very similar in its size and plans to the City of London building. 
From the technical point of view, the three sides of the "new and improved" Pembury Estate would be printed on three large “building wraps”, similar to those perforated banners used for covering the scaffolding inside construction sites, linstalled on the north, south and west side of the great inner atrium of Bloomsberg HQ. The fourth side, made of curved glass, would be covered by several smaller banners corresponding to the different walkways, to create the image of a new luxury residential building to confront the facades of Pembury Estate.
The "reconstruction" of the social housing estate would thus be realized by adding some details - new balconies, wood paneling, glass coloured surfaces - to renew its image. This aspect is a reference to several projects which in recent years "renewed" this typology of buildings all over England, through architectonical interventions and real estate operations, making them "funky and affordable" but at the same time causing the more or less forced departure of the majority of its original inhabitants.
Similarly the east side of the atrium itself would represent a new batch of luxury apartments.
Darbyshire also designed a 3D interactive "show home" environment: this installation would occupy the mezzanine of the north side of the Bloomberg HQ and would reproduce an apartment of this new, renewed, social housing estate, ready to be shown to the - imaginary - potential customers. It would reproduce exactly the volumes and plans of a typical Pembury Estate 50 square meters apartment, which will be furnished with contemporary objects, images and design pieces that would, through their non-specificity, manage “to epitomize and critique the aspirations and taste preferences of our time”, as we can see in other works of the artist such as Blades House (2008) or Oak Effect (2012).
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This project proposes an intervention in the area in front of the entrance of the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield. Darbyshire here articulates the space through three elements: an unfinished Arts and Crafts half-hipped gable structure in developers vernacular, a B&Q pergola - B&Q is the well-known UK chain dedicated to DIY and gardening - and a medieval trebuchet orientated towards the new David Chipperfield designed gallery.
The three signs arranged in the area recall frequent themes in the artist's research, such as a critic to the homogenisation of contemporary design, to the standardization of the spaces, and the questioning of the regeneration processes carried out by government agencies and/or private developers, and stand opposite to the minimalist, award-winning and iconic museum building designed by an archistar
Officially, the work has not been realised for a planning issue. 
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Matthew Darbyshire project for Kettle’s Yard - which today is a department of the University of Cambridge and a gallery - was designed for the left side of the building, overlooking Castle Street: during the renovation works for the new education wing, rather than just a billboard the artist proposed a perforated building wrap, similar to those used in building sites where it’s possible to see a reproduction of the façade momentarily hidden. This would lead to a “coming soon” effect in the viewer, and then to subsequent feelings of ambiguity and confusion: Darbyshire instead of the trompe l’oeil of the real future building would have printed on the wrap the vision of a future development of the building in a "Thatcherite, low-cost vernacular" style, intended to be a dystopian cultural one stop shop for the contemporary England.
The aim was precisely to comment - through an image which represents architecture and its values – on the possibility that a cultural space such as Kettle’s Yard may in future turn into something different (even if the current renovation works just involved the education wing of the gallery). The title itself - ukfun-ky - refers to a possible “regeneration” of Kettle’s Yard, enacting a criticism of these processes and of the spreading of anonymous and interchangeable spaces in the urban pattern. There are specific references to the policies adopted in the eighties in the UK, which was made of "thoughtless and insensitive developments", was moved only by profit and that now seems to the artist so close to a revival.
The Director of the gallery disapproved and an alternative was formulated. 
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This project is - in the artist’s intention - a “quasi-scientific experiment”, and consists of a permanent public sculpture, made of a prefabricated glass architectural structure  (approx 5x5m wide and 3m high) produced by a company that usually supplies similar commercial spaces (the artist given example is Kingspan). This space would be furnished following a survey carried out in five public-access buildings from each of the five UK major cities., with the expectation of identifying "the most generic and ubiquitous of design elements". The artist at the same time would collect different ‘codes of conduct’, which should also then be applied - all together - inside the installation. The access to the space would be granted to five people at a time, and thanks to an applied two-way mirror film, “those outside could observe the actions of those inside whilst those inside would experience a sense of isolation and immersion in their immediate confines”, while the rules would be enforced by a guard.
The concept revolves around the opportunity of exploring “a new idea of conscious surrender”, instead of the strategies of resistance and disobedience usually applied in the name of creativity and artistic freedom: Darbyshire research about the progressive and growing standardization of the designed space around us, which leads the spaces themselves to be less and less recognizable in respect to their function, here is declined alongside an investigation of the freedom that within these spaces we choose to give up for many different reasons. Starting from the writings by Georges Perec and Marc Augé, but also by socio-political theorists Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Mark Fisher, Darbyshire here comes to theorize a model to wonder "if in fact surrender could be more liberating than resistance", considering contemporary social pressures. The aim is to create a space that does not declare its function, which may appear anonymous and go unnoticed, and that leaves its user confused as to what is expected from it. 
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