English photographer, sculptor and filmmaker. Mat Collishaw studied at the Trent Polytechnic (1985–6), and at Goldsmiths College in London (1986–9). For his first solo exhibition he created One Photo, Four Broads and a Stretcher, a colour photographic reproduction of Watteau's L'Enseigne de Gersaint (1721), greatly enlarged and cursorily attached to a wooden frame. The display Collishaw highlighted issues of representation, raised in the original painting through the juxtaposition of the false idyll of the fête galante, and the actualities of the art market. Much of Collishaw's subsequent work makes historical and art-historical references that hinge around the broad theme of the interaction between nature and culture. The ambiguous relationship between representation and reality is an underlying theme also of works involving the projection of videos into ‘real' environments. The technological prestidigitation behind these works is always slightly transparent, making viewers aware of their own complicity in being deceived