Mathew Wayne Parkin
Matthew's Project Title is 'It spread through gaps and voids in construction: A practice-based investigation into a fire at a gay sauna exploring archives, fabulation and accessibility in artists’ moving image. Read more about Matthew's research.
Fine Art Postgraduate Researcher
Supervisors- Dr Fiona Anderson and Giles Bailey
Mathew Wayne Parkin is a sodden artist, suspicious writer and sometimes researcher. They often work with experimental moving-image as part of an expanded practice that encompasses exhibition making, relationships, writing and programming. Parkin is particularly interested in autobiography, intimacy and speech. Resisting dominant and professionalised forms of media and moving image production, Parkin embraces DIY and home video techniques, as well as queer crip analysis. Their work is like an armpit, personal and intimate, of the body and relationships – smelling earthy.
This AHRC-funded, practice-based PhD centres on the unresolved 2016 fire at a gay sauna located in a working class area of Leeds, West Yorkshire. Using narrative strategies associated with omission, it considers how absence, speculation, and erasure operate within both true crime and queer histories. The research is grounded in community engagement, an intersectional understanding of accessibility, and archival investigation, with a particular focus on access within artist moving image practices.
Presentations:
Parkin has shared work with Cubitt Gallery; York St John University; Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives; LUX; Videoclub; Book Works; V22 Foundation; IMT Gallery; Grand Union; Workplace Gallery; MAP Magazine, Embassy Gallery; Spike Island; Eastside Projects; Tramway; S1 Artspace; the ICA; and undertaken residencies at Triangle France – Astérides; Hospitalfield Arts; and Cove Park.
