Portrait by Claudia Fitzpatrick. All images courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

This interview was featured in Issue No.24 - Identity

ANNETTE AN-JEN LIU: Your practice is driven by narrative, an approach in which you previously employed text alongside images and have also created several montage films. However, Portals is not accompanied by words or video; the implied narratives are shaped by the careful pairing of images instead. Can you talk about the decision to work in diptychs for this new series?

Tracey Moffatt: With Portals, I enjoy the idea of an audience connecting images and creating their own “reading” of my narratives not unlike a comic strip. The deliberate pairing of my diptychs by placing a larger image beside a smaller one in icy exactness was and is a fantastic experiment to do. Thus, my “storylines’” can go many places and spin off in many directions. I am not a didactic artist; I don’t like to “direct” an audience.

Tracey Moffatt, *The Hospital Ship*, 2019.

ANNETTE: The fictional narratives in your images often refer to historical events and existing places with hints of autobiography. But they are not often clear. How and why do you keep these details ambiguous?

Tracey: I prefer to only imply autobiographical elements as I don’t want my works to be perceived as “confessional” and “about Tracey Moffatt’s life.” This would bore me to do this and probably bore an audience. But being much more indistinct is more freeing… freeing for me, the artist, and, hopefully, for an audience. Audiences can possibly read their own lives and emotions into my artworks or respond to a familiar landscape or location coming from their dreams or memories. If this happens, then I know that my images transcend the “autobiographical” and spin off into other dimensional perceptions.

ANNETTE: You describe the camera as an instrument you use to develop your artistic visions. Yet, in Portals, you sought to establish a painterly quality, and are insistent at stepping away from documentary and realism! What is it about the photographic process that you keep returning to?

Tracey: The soft painterly photographic technique I have been playing with is so uncontrollable. My way of shooting a scene in low light with a moving camera is somewhere between stills photography and cinematography, but the results are like death—you capture nothing but a terrible dark blob, and, then, you have to spend months trying to “open it up.” Printing it again and again and again until the image emerges and “sings.” In the end, my nerve-wracking bank balance drainage from photo lab printing costs is all worth it because you can end up with a unique-looking image. The never-seen-before-in-technique, the imagery, is the key to what I seek—it turns me on.