PROFILING CDU ARTISTS: MATTHEW VAN RODEN WAX, TEXT, FLESH
Like Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the material concerns of my creative practice are an ever overlapping, folding of three-in-one. A trinity of wax, text and flesh. Words that become flesh, flesh that becomes fluid, a fluidity that becomes discursive; I’m seeking to draw out the queerest aspects of their material natures. Currently a Master by Research student at CDU, my postgraduate studies have centred around articulating this sense of a queer materiality, particularly around the re-reading and creative re-writing of texts as art, especially Biblical texts. I’m interested in the conjunctions of text and the body, how texts are inscribed in the body, written into us in some way or another and the creative capacity therefore of our bodies to re-write them.
For me, this manifests in my work in an increasingly performative manner. My research/practice has led me to explore video in a deeper way. Incorporating both the analogue and the digital into my work, in some way dissolving that binary, I’m seeking to create ways for the wax, text and flesh to make or complete each other in the work.
In a recent show The word becomes flesh at CDUs Nan Giese Gallery, layers of wax, layers of text, projected video, and sound layers coalesce to form the principle work. From the void a curious, genderless creature finds colour and texture from a grid of fleshy wax panels. Wax text stencils appear as scarred skin of the twisting, contorting, naked form. A deep voice echoes a similarly twisted soliloquy. Wax, text and flesh fold over each other, each giving fuller meaning, texture and realisation.
Wax is an appealing material, so fleshy, so touchable, historically standing in as simulacrum for the body. Its nature strikes me as inherently queer; constantly shifting, changing states, changing form. Simultaneously stable and volatile, wax is the ultimate binary smasher. It has become integral to my current practice. One that likewise seeks to be a binary smasher; constantly shifting, changing states, changing form; something determinedly queer.
Video, particularly, grants access to creative outputs that shift through time; that form their meaning precisely through that shifting. It strikes me as at least peculiar, if not queer, that I can inhabit that process of meaning through change; my digital body (flesh) on the threshold of the unknown.
Bringing these materials into the service of interrogating notions of the text, what it is, where it is, how it is queer or can be queered. Exploring the overlaps between them and the aesthetic that they create when employed together in the creation of new forms. These have been the joys of my research to date, and I am so grateful for the space, support and opportunity to undertake it.
Spectacular Failures is an upcoming exhibition of CDU postgraduate visual arts students at the Nan Giese Gallery, and you can see my and other’s work as part of the 2018 Darwin Festival program.
