The Death of Chatterton 2024

In mid-2024, I visited North Queensland, Australia. In a tiny sugar-growing township, I encountered a young burlesque performer and hospitality worker, Jack Betteridge. Despite the rabid conservatism of this regional community, and without compromising his Queer identity and beliefs, Betteridge had forged a place of acceptance for himself, winning the respect of contemporaries and elders with whom he engaged in a daily exchange of views and experiences, a true dialogue. Before leaving the UK, I had been spending many hours in the National Gallery, London, intrigued and challenged by Henry Wallis’ renowned 1856 canvas, The Death of Chatterton. It occurred to me that Betteridge would make a suitable model, and something of a retro-fitted case study, for a photographic reinterpretation of the painting, bringing Betterige himself into dialogue with the painting and its historical subject. In collaboration with him, a further dialogue so to say, we updated the mise en scene of the work, a garret, to that of a modest local house where Betteridge posed and performed as a modern Chatterton, driven to seeming self-harm over the outcome of an unrequited infatuation with a heteronormative love object.