Metro Arts Artist in Residence: A man that didn't have betrayal in his heart | 2025 | Metro Arts MAVA Substation, Brisbane
A man that didn’t have betrayal in his heart 2025 amasses newly developed sculptural assemblage and brings it forward into the gallery for display and critical examination. Harkening back to a younger me, these works reconstruct engagements in erotic scenario. Capricious and foolish longing, kink gone awry and where the toil of sensuality – its unpronounced labour – is a submission to melancholy. Instead of using erotic abstraction to reclaim intimacy, these sculptures revel in the makers floundering inadequacy (anxious and self-aware). Drawing from minimalism, love hotel interiors, industrial materials, kink environments, classical statuary, ball gags, medieval torture devices, fetishism and diaristic modes of confession. Such an amalgamation of stimuli manifests into a paracosm – an internal topology of the desiring self. A decidedly strange BDSM realm of liminality, fluidity and ambiguity built on the legacy of American and Australian post-fetish sculpture and installation practice. One that contemporises sub-cultural methods, to advocate for erotic appetites that are unsure, despondent and in flux. Sculptural tableau is poetic simulation, denoting: scene, body, apparatus, arousal and the dissolution of the self after orgasm.
(works in progress, alongside web sourced archive material)
A man that didn’t have betrayal in his heart 2025 amasses newly developed sculptural assemblage and brings it forward into the gallery for display and critical examination. Harkening back to a younger me, these works reconstruct engagements in erotic scenario. Capricious and foolish longing, kink gone awry and where the toil of sensuality – its unpronounced labour – is a submission to melancholy. Instead of using erotic abstraction to reclaim intimacy, these sculptures revel in the makers floundering inadequacy (anxious and self-aware). Drawing from minimalism, love hotel interiors, industrial materials, kink environments, classical statuary, ball gags, medieval torture devices, fetishism and diaristic modes of confession. Such an amalgamation of stimuli manifests into a paracosm – an internal topology of the desiring self. A decidedly strange BDSM realm of liminality, fluidity and ambiguity built on the legacy of American and Australian post-fetish sculpture and installation practice. One that contemporises sub-cultural methods, to advocate for erotic appetites that are unsure, despondent and in flux. Sculptural tableau is poetic simulation, denoting: scene, body, apparatus, arousal and the dissolution of the self after orgasm.
(works in progress, alongside web sourced archive material)
|
|
Dominance as omnipotence - encasing - walls that surround, an entity in the darkened geography of the mind.
In these terms, Fetish as a practice is a dialogical epistemology, directed by desire it interleaves pathos and logos. Working from the position of fetishist/animist, the volition that this libidinal investment imbues oscillates between the materials and the subject. Being a conversation between top and bottom, it acknowledges the osmotic nature of this threshold, the transference of power cyclical until realised. In terms of a BDSM power hierarchy, it would be considered making like a ‘switch’.
Merger of flesh and the elevated internal scape of released or realised pleasure. Formation, rigidity and alignment of purpose creating visible signs of anchorage and grounded formation, what appears disorient and afloat is almost elevate growth. What merger is conducive to.
If you thought of harnessing/a harness as a shape, a conduit for the flow of power, it is not restrictional but directional. So, when we speak of leather harnessing as a garment, it is a form that creates a track for action by instating physical parameters while erasing all behavioural unnecessity. Applicable in husbandry, but the allure is in overt behavioural manipulation, which accents the interplay of existent relationship dynamics, so, the hierarchy of penetrative mammalian sex (what we conceive as the norm) is punctuated and elevated to eroticised dramatization. One a receptive surface and the other the active force, bodily cues for contortion at the anchorage point of a leather band.
|
Plaster as bone setter, immobilizing emotional apparatus, rigid structure holds the injury (old trauma) in place until correct alignment.
Material based in the simulate, to replicate - the lexicon of fetishisms habit towards substitution.
Gypsum in practice:
Calcium basis/ of high compression creating a tensile strength with reduced moisture intake. Bed casts in pre drafted recesses of perspex, where the initial laying down of dry mica pigment is then compelled by the forces of drip pours into faux marble surface. Gesture, surface friction, and fluid rate translate into an array of branching composition or diffused discolouration, likened to markers on flesh surface, muscle contusions, the bruising of impact trauma. Violence of the action, poetic material translation detail the beauty and purpose of its execution. 
Imperfections, dirt, grit and viscera:
Marble undergoing metamorphism, compression, heat and pressure where calcite crystallise into crystalline rock. Irregularities in the strata’s sedimentary surface (fossils [past experiences, fears, trauma remnants] and matter [desire, bodily fixation and taboos] ) crystallise into veins and whorls of distinction, not dissimilar to a pearl. The root of the irritant is glossed, compressed and pressurised into an allure. (Substrate) – limestone - marble. (Limestone) pre-metamorphic material, harbours porosity to distil another’s essence, purify. Where the sedimentary remnants occur as the particle indications of seepage. Material markers indicator of dual processing. 
Speleothems, distended growth patterns of limestone geography, one material then morphs into infinite formation, distillation leaving markers. An analogy about potential of unrefined and untended material, alongside the formative potential of shared consensual pain to build desire that is grounding and generative. Typically, architecturally designated terminology, (dripstones, flow stones, pool deposits and pore deposits - columns, straws, curtaining). Entangled nature of dually tended desires, action impressing upon drives and forces of personality and ego between participants.
Harnessing (behavioural modifiers - switches, channels, conduits and vessels):
Shift from inert surfaces (women or partners as inert material stimuli for the erotic into agentive pathways). Offshoots of the channel where desires bloom, (grounding diffuses violent force) – exerted on the self, allows growth. (pole work) 
|
2024
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2020
|
|
2018
|
|
|
|
|
|
2016
|
|
2014
2010
|
|