Mattear’s body of work acts as a warm obituary that celebrates the imprints of time and preserves the warmth of where people and moments once lived. She invites viewers to remember moments that have died but still live inside us, to feel the quiet humanity carried within what has been worn and left behind. Mattear pulls from film, secondhand clothing, antiques, childhood memories and the great outdoors. She is inspired by old technicolor colour grading and often notices vibrant yellows, true blues and electric pinks in nature. In the less saturated hours after dusk and into the night, Mattear is always called to remember her childhood in rural Ontario, Canada, surrounded by farmland or up in the Canadian Shield. There were never any street lights or flashing vehicles. The night was always lit by a campfire or a barbeque. In this orange glow shadows emerge, and the imagination wanders. Mattear’s practice lives here, behind the glow of the fire, fishing for faces and characters in the dark. But as a child growing up in rural spaces these characters were never malicious, they were ladies of the land coming to share a meal or a story. These women find their way into her paintings as self portraits or as characters in their own right. She is fascinated by the weathered female figure, finding the freedom that comes with aging in nature, haunting the landscape⸺riding the line between beautiful and sinister in the same way an old pine grows and bends.