Matthew Peers: Wishing Wells

Wishing Wells is a title that sets out a structure of expectation. A wishing well is a site organised around projection, delay, and contingency. Something is offered. Nothing is assured in return.

Matthew Peers works within that structure.

Wishing Wells (2023–2025) is a body of work built through return, accumulation, and extended attention. The date span matters. It marks the work not as a discrete statement but as an ongoing procedure of looking, recording, and re-sequencing. Peers is attentive to what the works do over time: how they shift through repetition, adjacency, and duration.

The work can be placed within a broader lineage in which the ordinary functions less as subject matter than as a condition of method. But Wishing Wells is not driven by nostalgia or recovery. Its images remain present-tense. They hold their position.

Published as part of The New Rare Editions series, Wishing Wells belongs to a series of limited publications produced in close collaboration with artists. These editions are conceived not as secondary documents, but as works structured through format, sequence, and handling. They occupy a space between publication, record, and object.

What remains compelling in Wishing Wells is its refusal of closure. In place of declaration, it offers recurrence. In place of resolution, a held interval. The work does not deliver itself all at once. It alters slightly with each return.

A wishing well does not return what is placed into it. It stores the act of projection itself.

Matthew Peers — Wishing Wells, 2023–2025 is available to purchase here.