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Mel Deerson

Mel Deerson

PhD Candidate
Arts, Design & Architecture
School of Art & Design

Email: m.deerson@unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Diana Baker-Smith, Fernando do Campo, Veronica Tello

I am an artist, writer and teacher, working both solo and collaboratively. I make work that's intimate, vivid and sometimes funny, and create a multifaceted imaginative world across numerous media. I often work with historical and archival material in an embodied way.

I have presented work and writing in spaces such as the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Liquid Architecture, Getrude Contemporary, West Space, Monash University Museum of Art, Art+Australia, Un Magazine and Runway Magazine. In 2023 I was awarded the University Prato Centre (MUPC) Artist in Residence, to study angels, stained glass, medieval art and local queer histories.

Keywords: Queer medievalisms, women mystics, erotohistoriography, performance, poetry.

This practice-based PhD project reaches across time and space toward queer desire as a marginalised, hard-to-grasp spirit, with me as both its visionary conduit and scribe. Drawing on medieval and early modern women’s mystic practices, and using video, sound, writing, drawing and my own body, this research explores queer temporalities in relation to a number of historical ‘sites’, both textual and artistic, in Europe between AD 600 to AD 1500. These medieval ‘sites’ include stained glass windows, illuminated manuscripts, music, and texts. Methodologically, I employ Elizabeth Freeman’s queer ‘erotohistoriography’, an approach of pleasurably ‘fingering history’. I link this to ‘manicules’ in medieval manuscripts - annotations in the margins of a finger pointing to the text, usually made by subsequent readers after the work was finished. In this way my project is methodologically ‘manicular’ - a desiring finger entering an opening in an old text, gently probing the illusion of a finished past, and opening up new possibilities in the present.
  • The Dream of the Cherry Tree - a queer, playful take on a medieval manuscript including poems and drawings. A queered pantheon of god, Mary and the angels yearn, bicker, labour and rebel in an extended poetic mystic vision, moving through an erotic, dream-like world. Exuberant hand-drawn letters head each page, accompanied by dense multifaceted images like stained glass windows. Published by Stray Pages, 44 page, soft cover with dust jacket. Risograph printed used blue, bright red and yellow inks. First edition of 100. ISBN: 978-0-6457611-6-0
  • Immodest Acts - A performance in a deconsecrated chapel in Palazzo Vai, Prato, Italy, drawing on the history of Sister Benedetta Carlini, a nearby 17th century ‘lesbian’ mystic nun who was possessed by an angel. Created as part of the Monash Prato Artist in Residence program.
  • Frederik Ruysch and his Mummies, a brief study on bodies and souls - Paper, sound/video presentation at AAANZ Conference, Gold Coast, Australia.
  • Archives and Embodiment Panel, chaired by Diana Baker-Smith and Frances Barrett.
  • Using archival and art historical material and anchoring on the taxidermy-artworks of Frederick Ruysch (1638-1731), who preserved and arranged children’s cadavers and skeletons in dioramas, and Giacomo Leopardi’s short story ‘The dialogue between Frederich Ruysch and his mummies’ (1827), I think through questions of the body and soul in relation to memory and loss.
  • Fairy - with Spiros Panigirakis. An ongoing queer pedagogies project, presented in various iterations at the Fitzroy Gardens Melbourne, Platform Arts Geelong, Sydenham International Sydney, and as a publication through 3Ply projects.