Robyn Moore

Being in the Land (work in progress, 2016-present)

I am interested in what is beyond our control, what we struggle against, what we deny that is inherent within ourselves and our environment—ecological laws, laws of the flesh. What is the connection between personal experience and biological memory? Landscapes change, move, uplift, and erode. Where does the individual find herself within the scope of natural history?

Landscapes embody memory in a physical way: both the footprint and the fossil show us how living things leave traces in the land in ways that endure and communicate. But the land is also home to the spectral and the invisible. How can we connect with the beings and forces in the land that remain unseen?

The land calls me to respond. In my desperation to materialize this feeling of so many others in the land, I wrap myself in a silver emergency blanket and photograph myself during long photographic exposures, which creates luminous corporeal forms. For me, each image becomes both an experiment in self-portraiture and evocation of the numinous other, more-than-human beings and forces that dwell there. My hope is that such superimpositions challenge the idea of a strictly human identity through the blurring of boundaries between self and deep time other.

I also hope my works offer opportunities to think about how all entities—seen and unseen—co-mingle in shared biological spaces...and that humans must finally concede any notion of exceptionalism.

Present, Near, and Deep (2013-2014)

Present, Near, and Deep is a series of photographic artworks that focuses on the investigation of biological remains and traces, such as fossils, bones, and preserved scientific specimens, through the creation of images made with hand-coated liquid silver gelatin photographic emulsion. The images in this series, which began as documentary photographs of biological specimens made in museums located in the United States and Australia, explore how visibly material photographic practices can provide opportunities to discover how animal bodies are meaningful for both makers and viewers. Informed by my own phenomenological experiences with animals and their remains, my project seeks to gain knowledge about other animals that scientific inquiry, for example, cannot provide.    

For me the works from Present, Near, and Deep are a manifestation of the embodied, visceral response I had whilst engaging these specimens. Like a fossil I might pick up from a riverbed and hold in my hand, biological specimens I encounter in museums seem to me inherently meaningful but epistemologically inaccessible. It has been through the making of and engagement with these artworks, however, that their meaning has become intelligible to me. Though the production of these pieces includes a considerable amount of pre-visualization and planning, perhaps most crucial to their success is the incorporation of the mistakes, accidents, and unpredictable intercessions of the hand-made photograph. Indeed, by harnessing the unpredictability and vibrant materiality of the liquid emulsion process my aim has been to make pieces that themselves seem to be unpredictable, changeful, and vibrant.

These works are intended to manifest the fossil’s phenomenological qualities and epistemological potencies, appearing not as representations, for example, but as animate corporeal entities that rupture temporal and spatial boundaries. Above all, the materiality of these works envisages a deep time creaturely other. Indeed, as these works have emerged from the studio their original status as skeleton or wet specimen has been superseded by this new form. Effectively, the materiality of the works reincarnate the specimens into new beings for which the photographic emulsion itself becomes like a new skin. As such, I see the works of Present, Near, and Deep as living fossils effected through my own perceptual processes, questions, and desires, with the potential to be biosemiotic agents that viewers find meaningful through their own engagement with the work.

Museum Elegies (work in progress, 2019-)

How can photography bring us closer to other animals? Museum Elegies addresses this question through the reimagining of animal bodies usually seen as biological specimens in natural history museums. These images began as straight documentary photographs made in museums in both the US and Australia. However, the digital editing process allows me to strip away unnecessary information, to layer in new backgrounds and textures, and to create new information and detail from the existing image data—a process that, effectively, produces a kind of digital pulp. The edited image is then printed using an analog, non-toxic photopolymer gravure printmaking process that, hopefully, reveals the animal’s body as lively and vibrant. I hope that the visibly material qualities of these prints connect the viewer viscerally (not just optically) to the sense of creatureliness and vibrancy I feel are inherent in these bodies as much as provoke thought about the lives and deaths of the individual animals themselves. I also hope my works show how the use of digital photographic processes can be hybridized with analog techniques to help us experience other animals in new ways. Such deeply felt, corporeal connections may facilitate new understandings of other beings with whom we share the vulnerabilities and affordances of embodiment.

Embodied Knowledge (work in progress, 2019-)

The works from Embodied Knowledge reflect my obsession with exploring how the creatures and objects of the biological world—many of whom I encounter whilst photographing in the landscape—seem to encode meaningful information in and with their bodies. For me, the artwork itself is a way to explore and make contact with what appears to be a visual biological language that seems, at times, only barely intelligible yet all the while absolutely innate among all living things. Each work is both an aesthetic record of my own biosemiotic processes and a meditation on the vulnerabilities and affordances shared by all embodied entities. My hope is that the viewer, affected by the work viscerally as much as optically, might feel this significance and reflect on its meaning for themselves.