Mathew Wayne Parkin

It Spread Through Gaps and Voids in Construction

A distorted, grayscale poster or advertisement that has been heavily damaged or overlaid with scratches and white streaks. The background is dark and cloudy with large jagged diagonal lines cutting across the right side. A graphic is overlaid with text listing various fetish subcultures and event details.

Digital Video, 20:00

Developed during my AHRC-funded practice-based PhD at Newcastle University, this video takes the unresolved 2016 fire at a gay sauna in a working-class area of Leeds as its starting point, working outward through rumour, testimony, touch, omission and queer social memory. Drawing loosely from the narrative structures of true crime, and using interviews, description, reconstruction and partial narration, the video follows how events survive through fragmented evidence, speech and the people left around them, particularly when official records fail, disappear or cannot fully account for what happened. The work uses moving-image to hold uncertainty without resolving it, allowing visibility, proof and certainty to remain unstable.

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Black-and-white grainy and slightly scuffed aerial view of an area labelled "Quarters of Leeds," showing streets including Eyres Avenue, Theaker Lane, and nearby buildings.
Mini DV footage of three shirtless men of varying skin tones with white towels around their waists, sitting in the corner of a blue pub-style room with red seating and an intricate patterned carpet. Caption reads ‘then you’re in this kind of in-between space. Not outside anymore, not quite inside yet either.’
Dimly lit red hallway with a central door and bright overhead light.
Blurry red and orange lights with visible water droplets creating an abstract effect. Caption reads ‘It’d be ‘I’m just here for a drink’ and then they’d be off for a bit of action,’.
Low-quality BlackBerry phone footage of a bonfire pile made from branches, mattress springs, and debris with a smashed pumpkin in an urban wasteland. Caption reads ‘Someone posted a photo, just loads of smoke’.
A Canon Microfilm Scanner 400 displaying a newspaper page with the headline ‘Probe after complex gutted by huge blaze’. There is a faint reflection of a face in the screen. The caption reads ‘I don’t know if you could document a place like that. Most of it happened in the dark anyway.’
Aged wooden cabinet with a bookshelf behind a glass window door. On a drawer with a keyhole is red tape reading ‘COMMUNITY CARE’. In the cabinet is a range of books; in the middle is a white book spine reading ‘LEEDS HIV/AIDS DIRECTORY’. Caption reads ‘Uhm it’s like the fire, and then covid, and then lockdown, and it’s never really recovered here.’
iPhone footage of a light-skinned hand holding a simple handheld thermal imaging device displaying a heat signature in a grassy outdoor area. Caption reads ‘Witness 1: Origin of call: person with mobile phone. Property: non-residential building. Steam rooms.’
Colourful thermal map with green, yellow, blue, and orange tones, featuring a white crosshair in the centre. Caption reads ‘Just keep on walking, Just keep on walking oh yeah ‘.
Bright orange and yellow shapes, appearing like a stream and a pooling, against a purple background in a thermal image. Caption reads ‘Your love is my only desire’.