Mathew Jones

Snugglepot & Cuddlepie are Gay! A meditation on queer temporality.

Don’t Forget to Remember / The Family Tree Stops Here.

David McDiarmid

Those two titles from David McDiarmid’s 1991 series ‘Aphorisms’ neatly summarise the queer temporality problem. How, without anachronism, can a modern gay man identify with queer artists long gone? And what, if children are off the cards, is my investment in the future?

The project takes as its perverse focus the work of May Gibbs, author of “Snugglepot & Cuddlepie”, in part because sexual ambiguity pervades her biography but also because her work has been recently hailed as ‘queerly contemporary’. Using a methodology torn from the work of Leo Bersani (one which privileges digression born of visual analogy, correspondence and sameness) both the text and images bounce off aspects of Gibbs’ work then follow wayward unmarked paths that escape the well-trodden clichés of biological inheritance and DNA culture and exercise instead, a new model of queer temporality – one which facilitates my studio practise.