Preston, Julieanna. "Studios: Live Red Matter; Matisse's L'Atelier Rouge.” In Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes From the Victorians to the Moderns, edited by Georgina Downey, 75-90. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Studios: Live (red) matter assembles a sensibility-forming narrative incited by Henri Matisse’s 1911 painting L’atelier rouge (The Red Studio) and Jane Bennett’s theory on material vitality outlined in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). This material semiotic practice affords new insights into grasping active and affective material forces associated with the painting and the furnished home-studio interior it appears to represent. No longer assumed to be merely rooms filled with dead decorative objects selected and arranged to signify wealth, taste or social status, the things that surround us – the interior and its furniture and finishes (including paintings) – are posited as performative, provocative and creative things, if not more so, as co-dwellers in the generative space of the home-studio.