Tracey Moffatt 

Apart from an exhibition in Glasgow a few years ago, this is the first opportunity we have had to see a large body of work by Tracey Moffatt. Moffatt is a very successful, Australia-born, Australia-based artist. Born in 1960, Moffatt already has several big, fat catalogues to her name, produced in Europe, America and Australia. These publications are evidence of the artist’s popularity and the ways in which her work is well able to appeal to gallery-going audiences throughout the world, by circumventing conventional international boundaries…

…Moffatt takes as her subjects landscape, environment and people and devotes considerable energy to developing narratives about how these things impact and interact with each other. Her photographs are not documentary. Neither are they merely arranged still-lifes. Instead, as indicated earlier, Moffatt, through stunning use of composition, depth of field and colour, constructs her own fascinating pictorial realities, before inviting us to validate or question these realities…

…Her photographs are meticulously composed and constructed affairs, in which nothing is incidental. Every element is precisely placed. And Moffatt takes her photographs several stages further by re-photographing precisely the same constructed arrangement from different angles, thereby heightening our visual interest. The intriguing question that these bodies of work throw up is this: to what end does Moffatt’s work point? Is it autobiography? Is it narrative for its own sake? Is it a critique of history? Identity?” Geography or culture? Religion, perhaps? To what end has Moffatt produced what the exhibition curator, Denise Robinson, has called ‘out-takes from a film yet to be made’? 

There is of course no set nor satisfactory answer to this question because Moffatt’s work deals with ambiguities or fluid fragments, rather than with definitive clues. As Adrian Martin observes in the accompanying brochure ‘We get not stories but pieces of stories – painfully broken pieces, testifying to manifold kinds of lacerations upon personal, sexual, racial and national identity… Moffat brings out the ambiguities, the half-gestures, the unreadable looks and indecidable postures that sabotage any attempt at a linear, literal synopsis.’

The above extracts are from an exhibition review by Eddie Chambers of Tracey Moffatt at Arnolfini. The review appeared in  Art Monthly, London, Number 219, September 1998: 34-35 [RTTJ]