In Translation: Matthew Humphreys

Launch Event: Friday 20th March 2026 (5pm-7pm)

Exhibition Opening Dates: Friday 20th March– Sunday 26th April 2026 (open daily 10am-5pm)

FREE

In Translation is a new exhibition by London-based artist Matthew Humphreys exploring memory, family and the fragile ways we communicate and remember across time.

The exhibition brings together five new works created from fragments of the artist’s personal archive – home videos, drawings and photographs more than twenty years old.

Through film, installation and collaborative works with local students, Humphreys translates these fleeting moments into artworks that quietly explore care, loss and the ways memories are shaped by both technology and human touch.

Central to the exhibition are the artist’s parents, Mervyn and Betty. In the film Tendresse (2026), they appear in intimate family footage, while Sweep (2026) retraces the artist’s father’s working life inside a factory where he once worked. Other works extend these personal stories into the public realm: bird boxes built with Doncaster Deaf Trust students are installed on the building, while a walk-in camera obscura invites visitors to experience the street outside in a new way.

Humphreys, a Child of Deaf Adults (CODA), often explores communication beyond spoken language. In Translation invites audiences to slow down and experience memory through gesture, touch and image.

Everyone is welcome to attend the launch event on Friday 20 March, 5–7pm.

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Words by Jennie Gilman

It's 3pm on a Friday afternoon in Doncaster, and Matthew Humphreys is giving ArtBomb's shopfront a fresh lick of paint. 

“The paint is from a photograph of the last blue sky my father saw," explains Matthew, dipping a paintbrush into a freshly unlidded can of paint.

Matthew has travelled up to Doncaster from London to start prepping for his forthcoming exhibition, In Translation. Earlier that day, Matthew had taken a digital photo of the final blue sky his father had seen to be developed at Boots in French Gate. He then took the photo to the local B&Q and had the sky colour-matched and developed into a bespoke paint.

The shade is a vast, infinite blue. A blue that recalls those rare, long hot summer days spent playing out with mates during half term. Watching Matthew apply strokes of the paint to the wooden window trim, I almost get a whiff of sun cream, conjuring memories of family holidays, mum plastering yet another layer of SPF 50 onto my arms and legs before I scramble out of her hands to water bomb into the pool. 

These childhood moments, unlocked from somewhere in deep memory by this blue paint, make me think of family, of home and the ease of being a kid. It also reminds me of how much I seem to have forgotten from my childhood. I wonder if this is just an inevitable aspect of getting older, or in part due to too much partying. Perhaps it's because the Cloud promises to save decades worth of videos and photos somewhere in the digital realm, archiving a lifetime of memories so that my brain doesn't have to. 

I sometimes worry that my dependency on technology has damaged my ability to remember, an anxiety about what we might have lost to digital technology culturally echoed by the ongoing physical media trend. The retro revival of collecting CD's, DVD's and print zines seems to be an attempt to get to grips with who we are in the digital age through the objects we collect. But as Zarah McIntosh cautions in her analysis of physical media, this search for self perhaps risks a culture of over-consumption no different to the Stanley cup and Labubu doll hype. 

Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool. The Flares chain nightclub opposite ArtBomb, one of six branches in the UK promising a one-night hedonistic trip back to the 70's and 80's, has built its commercial success on it. Reform UK, who hold 37 seats on Doncaster's city council, have built their Trumpian campaigns on it, or at least a pseudo variety which makes people, disappointed with how things are today, long for a way of life which never really existed. 

Matthew's latest body of work, In Translation, takes an altogether different approach to memory, explored through gesture, touch, image-making and collaboration. He does so with a tenderness which throws the violence of nostalgia and miscommunication in a forgotten, post-industrial place like Doncaster into sharp new relief. 

In Translation consists of five new works, each a multimedia translation of ephemeral moments recovered from Matthew's personal archives that are over 20 years old, fragments of home videos, old drawings and stories distilled into visual artworks and released into the public sphere.

Betty, in Tendresse (2026)

At the heart of these works stand Matthew's parents, Mervyn and Betty, captured in Matthew's moving image work, Tendresse (2026). In other works, Matthew walks in the footsteps of his parents, retracing their movements with his own body. In a second moving image piece titled Sweep (2026), a cavernous factory is shot from a wide lens. Matthew steps into frame, wearing traditional dark blue overalls, sweeping sawdust from the factory floor where his father once worked. Matthew collected this sawdust, a by-product of the timber goods being made at the factory, and has repurposed it to fill the holes in ArtBomb's well-loved shopfront, faintly fragrancing the space with the warming smell of wood. This patched-up job on ArtBomb's facade is symbolic of Matthew's approach to art: seeking out the empty space that exists within our memories and filling these narrative gaps to create something new.

This act of tracing someone else's steps as a form of remembering, of walking in someone else's shoes to feel the things that they once had, is echoed through Flock (2026), a bespoke wallpaper of bird drawings, traced and finger painted onto plain white wall lining paper by students from Doncaster Deaf Trust. I had the pleasure of accompanying Matthew on this trip to the school back in February 2026, one of the oldest deaf schools in the country now increasingly referred to as a “school of communication". 

Rolling out metres of plain paper spanning the width of the school hall, we invited students from different year groups to trace a selection of bird drawings from Matthew's father's portfolio of birds using pencils and carbon paper. Together, bodies sprawled on the floor, we traced and retraced and traced again Mervyn's robins, blue tits, magpies and house sparrows, birds native to Doncaster, forming a kind of human production line and enacting a somatic form of remembrance for Mervyn. This felt particularly resonant within the setting of the school hall, where Matthew's mum, as a student at the school 70 years ago had once performed in plays. 

Earlier that morning, Matthew invited Year 8's to build their own birdbox, using an AI-inferred design based on a timber birdbox—one of many which Mervyn would make using off-cuts from the factory- which Matthew spotted in the blurry background of a photo of himself and his brother sitting in the family garden, smiling in front of a white canvas tent. The collection of birdboxes, titled A Reprise for Birds (2026), are mounted onto the front of ArtBomb's building and in the courtyard area, providing new nesting places for Doncaster's native birds and speaking to the themes of migration being explored within ArtBomb's wider programming. 

Matthew is a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), and his work is largely inspired by the role that he had as a communicator and translator for his parents. Growing up in a Deaf household, Matthew would act as a mediator between his parents and the hearing world, communicating through a combination of BSL (British Sign Language), lip reading and spoken language.

Deaf communication is highly visual and very physical, requiring a fluency in reading other people's body language and facial expressions, and at the most basic level, an ability to maintain eye contact when making conversation. In his work, Matthew exercises a flare for visual communication and an attunement to the quiet, fleeting moments which may otherwise get lost within an attention economy in which those who shout the loudest and dominate our screens the most are the ones that get heard and seen. 

Later in his life, Matthew's father developed blindness and Alzheimer's. When a person's capacity to see, hear or remember the world around them becomes less clear, touch becomes everything. The value of touch as a way to both create and experience art is communicated beautifully through Beyond the Visual, the UK’s first major sculpture exhibition in which blind and partially blind practitioners are central to the curatorial process, currently being shown at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

As someone who thinks and writes about art as part of their job, a question lingers in my mind after experiencing this exhibition: “How would you describe an artwork to someone who cannot see it?". This provocation is making me think differently about how to write about art without relying on ocularcentric language, instead considering how an artwork might feel, sound and smell.

Matthew (right) and his brother (left). In the top right corner of the photograph, you can see the bird box which inspired A Reprise for Birds (2026)

Matthew's approach, however, is slightly different. Mervyn's gradual loss of sight and memory prior to his passing in 2021 prompted Matthew, foremostly a filmmaker, to think deeply about the role of photography and video as a conduit for memory. Harnessing a range of analogue and digital cameras to produce the moving image works within In Translation, Matthew invites the audience to view the world through a kaleidoscopic, slightly blurry lens. He visually translates the world as his father might have experienced it: as non-linear fragments of beautiful, touching moments. The presence of loved ones helping Mervyn to navigate what could be a very disorienting world can be viscerally felt by the audience through the sheer devotion Matthew has committed in creating this body of work in his parent's honour. 

Encapsulating the artists' fascination with the mediating role played by technology in shaping the relationship between humans, memory and reality, Matthew has built a walk-in camera obscura entitled Staying with Light (2026), using the same techniques used to create the first camera 200 years ago and which will be installed in one half of the ArtBomb shop.

ArtBomb's visitors are invited to step inside of the camera and see an upside down image of the street outside projected back to them. This rendering of Doncaster turned on its head is emblematic of the shift in perceptions of the city that we try to encourage at ArtBomb through our commissioning, inviting local audiences to see their environment in a slightly new way, or through a stranger's eyes.

In a moment captured in Tendresse, Matthew can be seen guiding his father through the garden, heading out arm in arm to feel the warmth of the sun and fresh air outside. This moment, I think, captures the essence of In Translation: Matthew gently guiding the public through these incredibly personal, tender moments, moments translated into a silent poetry which reaches out into the high street and touches people, shifting something in them as they go about their everyday lives.

List of Works

A Reprise for Birds (2026)

Reconstructed bird boxes from AI-inferred plans, student-built structures, timber, printed plans

Flock (2026)

Student traced stencil drawings, finger paint on paper, installation

Sweep (2026)

Single channel video

Staying With Light (2026)

Camera Obscura, Matt Emulsion Paint colour matched to final sky in Tenderesse, Sawdust from factory floor

Tendresse (2026)

Single Channel Video

Links to Matthew's Work

Website: mjhumphreys.com

Instagram: @_mjhumphreys_