Suzanne Moxhay 'Tablea Vivant'

About

My method was derived, in part, from the early filmmaking technique of matte painting - where backdrops were painted on sheets of glass and integrated by the camera with the live-action on set. Echoing this method I build up the image in my studio using cutout fragments of source material, which I make into small stage sets on glass panels. I then re-photograph the sets and manipulate the images digitally, an act of reprocessing which takes them further away from their original context and broadens the narrative potential.

My source material is drawn from an archive of collected imagery - from mid 20th century books and magazines to contemporary found photographs as well as my own photographs and paintings.

I work intuitively with the material, finding points of connection between details - either through shared subject matter or formal considerations such as following the path of light from one image through another to create spaces, which at first may appear real but on closer inspection begin to dissolve. I play with anomalies - of texture, surface, depth, space, scale, movement and architecture - to involve the viewer in the construction of the image, and to make them question it.

On the surface of the printed image, clues to the origins of the sources remain visible - the flat oversaturated colour of a fragment from a 1950s magazine cuts into the printed halftone pattern from a later image - these differences, of texture and resolution, hold traces of the technology that produced them, drawing attention to the artefactual nature of photography.

In the finished work there is often an uneasy sense of a space that does not quite fit together - either formally or conceptually, but possesses a reality of its own. One which we are unable to pinpoint as factual or fictitious.

Suzanne Moxhay, 2016

Suzanne Moxhay lives and works in London. After completing a BA Hons in Painting at Chelsea College of Art she went on to The Royal Academy Schools where she graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art in 2007.

She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally since 2002 and her work is held in many significant public and private collections including the University of the Arts Collection, The Royal Academy of Arts, The Cooper Union New York, the FSC, the Lodeveans Collection and Oxford University. She has featured in numerous publications including The Guardian, A-N Magazine and Art World Magazine and has been profiled and interviewed on the BBC Culture Show.

Exhibitions include ‘Saatchi’s New Sensations / The Future Can Wait’ at Victoria House, London, ‘Afternoon Tea’ WW Gallery at the Venice Biennale and ‘GSK Contemporary: Earth Art of a Changing World’ at the Royal Academy of Arts. Her animation work has been shown as part of the programme ‘Do Billboards Dream of Electric Screens?’ on BBC public screens in cities across the UK and she has had two prints commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts.

Last year she had a solo exhibition in Milan and was nominated for the prestigious ‘BNL Paribas Award’ at the MIA Art Fair, Milan.