Caitlyn Matthews

Caitlyn Matthews is a contemporary artist who’s practice’s focal point centres around the body’s relationship to material and obscurity.
[I am] interested in the labour of the performance, the vulnerability of the body and the abstract effects of interacting with different materials and lighting and how these things can manipulate the body. They often step into these awkward moments, implicating themself and the viewer.

[My] practice is influenced by the Fourth-wave feminist movement that began around 2012 and is characterized by a focus on the empowerment of women, the use of internet tools, and intersectionality. The fourth wave seeks greater gender equality by focusing on gendered norms and the marginalization of women in society.

This piece of photography comes from a film series where the artists explore their personal relationship to body, sexuality, and gender. This is explored through the interaction between, body, space, material, and light. The image is layered footage of their body dancing freely, uncensored, in a space. The images are then layered and configured within each other, the photos then begin to interact with each other in a playful manner like how their body interacts with the light, the body begins to interact with itself. The light, layering and camera distorting and manipulating the way the body is observed by the audience; the camera acting as a window.

The artwork is a comment on the artists relationship to the artists body, femineity, masculinity, sexuality, and gender.

“Femininity to me means an energy within every single human being, the part of you that is always changing, existing in the emotional world, which are always changing, from one second to the next, even though we like to think they are always the same. It can also exist within the physical realm, my body, moving, dancing, happening in the world with nature, hurricanes, tsunamis, fire. The femininity is concerned with intimacy and closeness and the masculine is more concerned with purpose and depth. Masculine is the part of us that grounds us in the moment and allows us to sit with uncomfortable things. It is the part of us that can be uncomfortable and not have to take action and have to expel energy. These qualities are ones that sit with all of us and should not be separated within sex or gender.”