- 2001 edition. 101 pages.
- Published by City Gallery Wellington
- Softcover. Large Landscape. Photos throughout
- Condition. Near new
Tracey Moffatt is probably Australia’s most successful artist ever, both nationally and internationally. She is certainly one of the few Australian artists to have established a global market for her work.
Over the last 25 years Moffatt has produced a cohesive body of work, from her celebrated 1989 series Something More to the more recent Fourth, 2001. Each series devolves upon an unwritten narrative – a story is implied, but never stated. Part of the artist’s project is to dismantle the conventions of storytelling, paradoxically by using artifice alone to tell her tales. At the same time, the power of her work derives from the persuasions of myth. Moffatt’s subjects touch on deep-seated, implacable issues, on the wounds that never heal – hence the title of her tragicomic series, Scarred for Life, 1994. Based on true stories told to the artist, this series captures both the pain and the restless energy at the heart of suburban life. Possibly Moffatt’s best work to date, its potency is due to the fact that, as the artist has explained, ‘ … everyone has a tragic tale to tell’.
Like the work of Destiny Deacon, Moffatt’s art is sharpened with pain and humour. In works such as Something More and, most explicitly, Laudanum, 1998, she engages the rhetorical confusions of racism through the sado-masochistic dynamic of the colonised subject. Indeed, her avowed ambivalence about being categorised as an Indigenous artist is at odds with her commitment to the fostering of Aboriginal culture, and to the central place of Indigeneity in her work.
This book is the first overview of Tracey Moffatt's work published in the southern hemisphere.
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