Tracey Moffatt is an Australian artist who focuses mainly on photography and video. She is probably most well known for her photographic work but she has created films, documentaries and videos. She tends to focus her work on Australian Aboriginal people and how they're understood in cultural and social terms.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/tracey-moffatt-2669
Her project Invocations was what caught my eye with her work because it relates most to my first initial idea. When I saw two images in particular #1 and #11 they made me think that they were based on Alice in Wonderland and dreams. When I saw these two images I had my initial idea come into my head. This is why I wanted to research into the images to find out what they're actually about. To start off with I wanted to find out what the word Invocations meant:
the action of invoking someone or something.
an incantation used to invoke a deity or the supernatural.
There are 13 images in the series which takes you on an eerie trip into another world. These images are drawn from dreams, visions, fairytales and thrillers which is exactly what I got from the images. I think it's really good that run her images she can get the story across without necessarily having narrative to go with them. The eeriness of the images cuts across styles, genres and mediums. The images have been created to make them look like something else. The images are silkscreened photographic prints that have been built up layer by layer to look like paintings. This has been done using formats that resemble old daguerreotypes and lantern slides.
She is known as a picture-maker not a picture-taker. She constructs sets and works with actors to realise cinematic narratives. 'The surreal drama of Invocations was based on a dream and delves into what Moffatt has called ‘the dark underworld that we all have … it’s about the murk in all of us, the subconscious.’ Moffatt has compared making the project from the dream to the object to a kind of witchcraft. To make the images she worked with set builders and actors in a studio to take photos which were the. silkscreened by hand ‘colour after colour, screen after screen, so the pictures have this sort of built up feel: like a pastel, a watercolour. And it’s very physical. I wanted the physicality of paint on paper. I wanted it to be sensual.’
I found this part of the researching the most interesting because I have had these ideas unintentionally in my head before researching into Moffatt. 'The fairy tale world she creates in Invocations is peopled by witches and spirits, the lost and vulnerable, who stumble through scenes and landscapes summoned from Disney’s animations, Hitchcock’s movies, Goya’s paintings and the stories of the Brothers Grimm.'
https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/2013.70.1/
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