[Photographer, b. 1960, Brisbane, Australia, lives in New York.]
Source article – interview with Tracey Moffatt Financial Review
” I am not concerned with verisimilitude… I am not concerned with capturing reality. I am concerned with creating it myself.”
Self portrait from the Something More Series
“My work may feature brown faces but it could be anybody’s story.”
“All my work is going to be new,” she replies. “All new! Large-scale photography and some video.”
Something More Series
“I cannot reveal my locations, and do not want my work to be read as Australian. It’s coming out of my imagination.”
Tracey Outside her Studio in Middlehead Sydney
“I just find it limiting,” she explains. “I favour places one could read as many different places.”
“It deals with the human condition, and so resonates with many cultures,” she says.
“I’ve never been that sort of artist,” she says. “Doing the same thing over and over would be too boring. I’m not like those painters who say that for the past 30 years they’ve been exploring red. It’s also to do with my attention span, which jumps around constantly. I’m always looking. My mind never stops. ”
From up in the Sky Series 1997
“I missed nature. It was my Aboriginal side kicking in, I couldn’t deny it. I couldn’t stand looking at that brick wall outside my window any longer. That’s all it was. And so I returned to the Sunshine Coast where I’d spent my childhood, and I thought it would all be so great – I could live in my beach house and be an artist – but it didn’t turn out that way because it was just too pretty. The Sunshine Coast is associated with holidays and there was no working vibe. So I had to come back to a city and put myself into a room again. And get a bit depressed. If I wasn’t driven and didn’t have an imagination, if I didn’t want to be an artist, I could live on the beach forever. I’d collect shells and make shell art.”
“Art dealers are only interested in you if you sell,” she says. “They don’t care about what you are, it’s only the work.”
Doll Birth 1972 from ‘Scarred for Life’ series (1994)
Charm Alone from ‘Scarred for Life’ series (1994)
Camera Clips 