Matheson is a knowledgeable and culturally sensitive artist. His artworks reference artefacts, crafting techniques and objects from a huge variety of alternating cultures and historical epochs. His artworks juxtapose futuristic, primordial, otherworldly and surreal qualities in equal measure.

Matheson combines many, often contradictory influences, in order to create a sense of timelessness. He binds them together in singular objects by using archetypes as the structural core of each work. His ceramic and clay sculptures are figurative: portraits, busts or full bodies, and, on occasions, animalistic. Bulls and falcons mix with the knotted brows, curving heads and enchanting, widened eyes of his human characters. Richly textured surfaces and chiselled human features reveal the deep psychological insights and personalities that slumber within his artworks.

In creating figurative artwork, he is continuing an artistic tradition thousands of years old, yet his sculptures have a surreal, dreamlike and futuristic quality. The enigmatic Maron is both archaic and ultramodern, expertly created by Matheson’s skilled hands and unique mind. The blue and grey swirling skin seems to glow and swell, and the textures are moonlike and fascinating. Other sculptures such as Water Bearer and Shaman reference widely used characters in art.

He twists traditional archetypes into new and original forms, and the results are captivating.

The same is true of his animal sculptures. The Bull is an animal that was forever fixed within the canon of Art History (along with the cockerel and the dove) by Pablo Picasso. Again, Matheson remoulds the animalistic and archetypal qualities of this animal in his own special way. He pushes the beast into an upright pose and creates large eyes to open up the creature as an object that can be looked into, and that can, as a result, look right back at us. The sharp tips of the horns are rounded off and turned into hollow forms that invite us inside the sculpture.