Tracey Moffatt (born 12 November 1960) is an Indigenous Australian artist who primarily uses photography and video.
In 2017 she represented Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition, "My Horizon". Her works are held in the collections of the Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales.
She currently lives in Sydney and New York City.
Though she is best known for her photographic works, Moffatt has created numerous films, documentaries and videos. Her work often focuses on Australian Aboriginal people and the way they are understood in cultural and social terms.
Early life and education
Moffatt was born in Brisbane in 1960 to a white father and an Aboriginal mother. At age three she was fostered out of her family, growing up as the eldest of three daughters in a white family and often left to look after her foster sisters.
Moffatt holds a degree in visual communications from the Queensland College of Art, graduating in 1982, and received an honorary doctorate in 2004.
In 2020, Moffatt was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
Early works
Moffatt's first short film was Nice Coloured Girls, made in 1987. It is a 16-minute story of three young Aboriginal women as they cruise Sydney's King's Cross entertainment district looking for fun, presented in cut-away context with the historical oppression of Indigenous women by white men. Gail Mabo acted in this film, and also danced in and choreographed another of Moffatt's short films, Watch Out (1987). Commissioned by the Murray Art Museum Albury and shot in Link Studios in Wodonga, Something More (1989) is a photographic series composed of six vibrant Cibachrome colour prints and three black-and-white prints. It is a now iconic series of photographs that built Moffatt's first widespread public attention, each of which borrows from film language to construct what is described as "an enigmatic narrative of a young woman looking for more out of life than the circumstances of her violent rural upbringing." Night Cries (1989/1990) is one of Moffatt's best-known films. Inspired by the 1955 classic Australian film Jedda, and sharing similar aesthetics to Something More, it tells the story of an Aboriginal woman forced to care for her ageing white mother.
1990s
Moffatt's photographic series Pet Thang (1991) and Laudanum (1998) returned to the themes of Something More exploring mixed and sometimes obscure references to issues of sexuality, history, representation and race. Other series of images, notably Scarred for Life (1994) and Scarred for Life II (1999) again tackled these themes but which referenced the photojournalism and photo essays of Life magazine accompanied by captions. While the words are compelling, they don't explain the images, indeed they tend to add to their enigmatic nature as though more information is a further dead end.
As her work progressed over the next decade, Moffatt began to explore narratives in more gothic settings. In Up in the Sky (1998) the artist's work again used a sequential narrative but instead of using fantasy settings, a story concerning Australia's "stolen generation" – Indigenous Australian children who were taken from their families and forcibly relocated under Government policy – was enacted and performed on location in Queensland's outback. Like Something More, Up in the sky employs the theme of race and violence, displaying a loose narrative set against the backdrop of a remote town, 'a place of ruin' and devastation populated by misfits and minor characters. It is one of Moffatt's larger series of photographs and takes its visual ideas from Italian modernist cinema Accattone (1961) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The story relies on a triangular mixed-race relationship. Of this work Moffatt stated: 'My work is full of emotion and drama, you can get to that drama by using a narrative, and my narratives are usually very simple, but I twist it ... there is a storyline, but ... there isn't a traditional beginning, middle and end.'
2000s
In 2000, Moffatt's work was amongst those by eight individual or collaborative groups of Indigenous Australian artists included in a major exhibition of Australian Indigenous art held in the prestigious Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The exhibition received a positive reception from Russian critics, one of whom wrote: