His Catechism: The Art of Donald Rodney, Third Text. 1998

…Following the completion of his Foundation Course at Bournville School of Art, it was probable – inevitable even – that Rodney would have gone on to become an artist of major significance, irrespective of how and in whatever direction his fledgling practice developed. But on arrival at Trent Polytechnic, Rodney met, in the year above him, the most influential and formidable figure of the ‘Black Art’ movement of the early 1980s, Keith Piper.

In relation to the politics, history and cultural thinking of the time, Piper’s work of the early 1980s was both potent and relevant. His work spoke of, and addressed what at the time came to be generally articulated as ‘the Black experience’. In due course many people – not least among them Piper himself – came to question the self-confident certainties and assumptions of ‘Black Art’ of the early 1980s. But 18 years ago, the fractious emergence of the ‘Black British’ youngster was marked out by apparently unambiguous experiences to which apparently unambiguous responses and commentary seemed entirely appropriate…

By the latter part of the 1980s Rodney started to make extensive use of discarded medical X-rays in his work. By this time, the disease of the blood, sickle-cell anaemia, from which he suffered, was increasingly taking hold of his body, obliging Rodney to spend ever greater periods of time in hospital. It was through and during his periods of hospitalization that Rodney obtained the X-rays that formed the basis of much of his work during the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s…

…It was also during this period that Rodney came to be ‘known’ almost as much for being the sickle-cell sufferer as he was known for being an artist. But again, more probing and more perceptive observers could see a bigger, more complex picture in which Rodney himself was always careful to maintain an intelligent and critical distance between himself and his illness. This work was not simply ‘about’ Black people, or ‘about’ sickle-cell. The work was about much wider constituencies and it broadly and specifically implicated all of its viewers, in a variety of ways. By using X-rays within his work, Rodney attempted to show ‘disease’ in the human body as a metaphor to represent political or societal ‘disease’ in assorted local, national or international contexts…

…One of the most compelling pieces of work in the exhibition was a small work, hardly measuring more than a few centimetres in any direction. As small as it was, the work seemed effortlessly to rise to the spatial challenges of the grandiose scale of South London Gallery. My Father, my Mother, my Sister, my Brother was a tiny house made of skin, taken from the artist’s body during the course of one of his numerous operations. The house, a delicate, simple dwelling seemed to symbolise the fragility and the near futility of Rodney having to live within a structure hopelessly unable to sustain itself or ultimately withstand even the smallest turbulence…

The above extracts are from a text written by Eddie Chambers, commissioned in the wake of artist Donald Rodney's untimely death, in March 1998. The text appeared in Third Text, Volume 12, Issue 44, 1998: 43 - 54