Mathew Keenan (b.1985)
The current obsession with selfies is an important starting point to my practice, this has developed into using self-portraiture to question society and received values. Over the past 5 years I have been working on a larger body of work that has looked broadly at British male identity. Using self-portraiture and still life I’ve researched themes of masculinity, sexuality, gender fluidity and plural identity and how these interplay with the culture in the North West of England where I grew up and entered the labour market.
For the past 2 years I have worked with large format cameras. This is important to my practice as creating images with a view camera and producing prints in the darkroom allows for a more tangible and tactile connection to the image making process. This arduous process of image making forces a longer period of time spent with each image. Finding meaning in the finely detailed rendering and of the traditional themes to be unpicked.