Matt Godden is an Australian artist with a wide-ranging practice covering Sculpture, Photography, and Graphic Novels.
Within these different mediums, Matt explores a variety of interlinked ideas. In Sculpture, he has interrogated the concept of restriction, and its symbiotic relationship with enablement via his Valve works, as a metaphor for disability and medical intervention. He also investigates the melancholic beauty of discarded, obsolete technology, especially when juxtaposed with biological forms, in his eWaste works. The melancholic flows to his Photographic works; urban landscapes, the gentle dilapidation within his Day And Night series from Japan, through to the life-amidst-industrial-rubble of Fish Noir. Melancholy combines with autobiography, mixed with visceral technological body-horror in his Nervous Spaces work. Technology, and its intersection with the classifications, and defined borders of life are a central theme of his Graphic Novel work Surfing The Deathline. Autobiography, and the experience of The Artist form the basis of his wall-scale Graphic Novel work The Metaning.
Matt has a Bachelor of Fine Art in Sculpture from the National Art School, where he was awarded the Sydney Olympic Park Sculpture Residency, and the FONAS Discipline Prize for (first place in) Second Year Art History & Theory. He is a past recipient of the Australia Council’s ArtStart Grant, and Arts Queensland’s stART Grant.
Matt’s primary Sculpture training was under Ron Robertson-Swann, Dave Horton & Jim Croke. He studied bronze casting under Clara Hali, and stone-carving under Paul Hopmeier.
While studying at the National Art School, Matt brought the institution before the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), in a case supported by the NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Centre, over NAS’ policy of charging disabled students 150% of a single year’s tuition fee, to complete one year of study units over two calendar years. This was due to an arbitrary decision on NAS’ part to charge any study under 50% of a year’s units of study at 50% of the full year fee, and any amount over 50% at 100% of the full year fee. The AHRC determined this policy was discriminatory under Australian law; the test being effect, not intent (as NAS had argued it was not their intention to discriminate). As a settlement, in which no compensation of any kind was sought by Matt, NAS agreed to change its fees policy, so that no student completing their studies in a reduced studies mode could be charged more than a percentage of a year’s fees equivalent to the number of units of study they completed each year. NAS staff were also required to undergo formal training in their obligations under Australian Human Rights Law, with regards to the rights of disabled students.
This is Matt’s proudest (and most unknown) achievement from his time at Art School; that no NAS student after him would be disabled by discriminatory fee structures.
Matt has a background in design, and education, having taught at a tertiary level in the public, private, and community sectors. The year he started his Fine Art degree, he was lucky to have the opportunity to teach at the Art Gallery of NSW, as part of the 2007 Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga exhibition.
In 2014, Matt travelled to New Zealand, to visit Gibbs Farm; one of the world’s largest private sculpture parks, and home to Richard Serra’s Te Tuhirangi Contour. He embarked on artistic travel again in 2019, this time to Japan, visiting both the Osamu Tezuka Museum, and taking a private tour of the premier Bonsai nurseries in Saitama, including many closed to the public. He was treated to a great generosity in being allowed photograph their collections for (private) research purposes in the forms and shapes of Bonsai. During this trip, he was fortunate to meet Masahiko Kimura during a visit to his private nursery, to be photographed next to his most famous works, and was granted special permission to see a fish pond that will forever remain one of the most amazing sights of his life. In addition, he visited the nursery / museum of Kunio Kobayashi, another of the towering geniuses of Bonsai, and an enthusiastically jolly host.
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