This monograph surveys Matt Arbuckles recent works made between 2019 and 2024, with particular attention to two exhibitions: Bow Echo (Two Rooms, Auckland, 2023) and Subduction and Abduction (Daine Singer, Naarm/Melbourne, 2024).A prolific maker, Arbuckles practice is a process-driven exploration of place, with landscapes conceptualised through the very act of their making. Favouring process over outcome, Arbuckle employs elements of traditional Japanese shibori dyeing techniques wrapping, twisting, folding, and draping fabric over found surfaces and structures to create abstract compositions. The resulting paintings use depth and movement to trace and reveal abstract memories, imprinting the experience of place into the artwork.Lucinda Bennett describes Arbuckles process as akin to unearthing hidden layers beneath a driveway, shaped by time, chance, and material transformation:Arbuckles paintings begin on a driveway like mine, are born in the dank,resilient synthetic fabric soaked in a vat of staining liquid and left folded onthe ground, exposed to the elements, until again they are soaked and folded,weathered by rain and groundwater, left unlovely to collect grit and sediment intheir knitted polyester grain, the cycle repeating until one lucky day when theyare retrieved, transported inside and laid out to dry, stretched between woodenbars and lifted off the floor, hung on the wall, finally in the light.In the light, they are transformed. What once appeared discarded and grimyhas been rehabilitated, not so much scrubbed up as distilled. In the light, darkseams hold weight, hold earth, might-be landmasses, horizons, islands, opaquebands of isthmus floating between watery sea and sky.The book intersperses Arbuckles painted works with a selection of the artistsphotographs, collected over the same period. These images create furtherassociations between place and landscape, and the abstract forms borne of thepainting process.Another essayist in the book, Melbourne-based curator and writer EmilyCormack, associates the works materiality with earths geological process:His work unfolds with the story of his site, allowing for the spread of gritand stain of paint, just as the earth permits the ebb and flow of sedimentaryactivity that gives it colour and texture. Because surely the grit from the studiofloor and the twists in a fabrics surface tell a more resonant story than anydescription of them? In this way Arbuckles painting processes are an attemptto bring story and site together and allow one to imprint on the other. . .Painting is not a written history. In its essence it transmits a story of matterand material, and of expanse and intimacy. In Matt Arbuckles works the pastand the present are folded together, like the sediment of the earth, marking themoment when story hits substrate. In each of his paintings are the episodicmemories of a child running fingers over the ragged layers of a cavessediment, the crumbling of mineral under thumb; the discovery of fools gold,and the tricks in the soil that tarnish new to old. His works evoke the hiddentidelines of the earth and the vast unknowns of an imagined, aching, openseascape.