Invocations #1 - Tracey Moffatt

The 13 images in the series Invocations are uncanny excursions into an otherworld, drawn from the imagery of dreams, visions, fairy tales and thrillers – a shared cultural memory reaching back to the eighteenth century. Their eeriness cuts across styles, genres and even mediums – these are images made to look like something else: silkscreened photographic prints that have been built up layer-by-layer to look like paintings, using formats that resemble old daguerreotypes and lantern slides.Moffatt is a picture-maker rather than a picture-taker. With a background in filmmaking, she constructs sets and works with actors to realise her cinematic narratives. The surreal drama of Invocations was based on a dream and delves into what Moffatt has called ‘the dark underworld that we all have … it’s about the murk in all of us, the subconscious.’ Moffatt has compared the making of Invocations, and the arcane ways in which it progressed from dream to object, to a kind of witchcraft. She worked with set builders and actors in a studio to take photographs, which were then silkscreened by hand ‘colour after colour, screen after screen, so the pictures have this sort of built up feel: like a pastel, a watercolour. And it’s very physical. I wanted the physicality of paint on paper. I wanted it to be sensual.’ The fairy tale world she creates in Invocations is peopled by witches and spirits, the lost and vulnerable, who stumble through scenes and landscapes summoned from Disney’s animations, Hitchcock’s movies, Goya’s paintings and the stories of the Brothers Grimm.All quotes from Tracey Moffatt interviewed by Bruce James, ABC Arts, 9 January 2001.- MCA