Matt Rugg

‘This is a delightful book about a lovely man and great artist. There’s a wonderful passage recalling a sweet shop in Bath that reminds me of the excitement and pleasure I had on my frequent visits to Matt’s studio in the tangle of buildings I shared with him over twenty years in London. That aside, the book also reveals how closely connected and deeply involved Matt was with almost all of the radical innovators in British Art education of the 1960s. He wore his distinction lightly and with a smile.’ - Richard Deacon, Sculptor

Michael Bird is an independent art historian and curator, and author of more than a dozen books, including St. Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time (2008, with a new edition being published in 2023), George Fullard: Sculpture and Survival (2017) and Studio Voices: Art and Life in 20th-Century Britain (2018) (all published by Lund Humphries). In 2016 he was National Life Stories Goodison Fellow and in 2018-21 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter. In 2022 he co-curated Living the Landscape: Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and the Artists of St Ives at the Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen.

Dr Harriet Sutcliffe is an artist, curator and researcher. She is Associate Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, where she completed her PhD, focused on the Basic Course at King’s College, in 2021. Recent projects include Undutiful Spirit, a Baltic Artist’s Archive Residency (2022), and Matt Rugg: Notations, Passages, Intervals at the Cut Gallery (2022). She is curating Matt Rugg: Connecting Form at the Hatton Gallery in autumn 2023.