Tracey Moffatt

Tracey Moffatt: Indigenous heritage shaped her art

Tracey Moffatt was born on 12th November 1960 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The daughter of a white father and an Indigenous mother, she was taken into care by a white family at the age of three, where she often had to look after her three younger foster sisters. Her birth mother's origins had a lasting influence on Moffatt's art, with which she repeatedly thematised this family heritage, the culture of the Aborigines. Her first short film, Nice Coloured Girls, from 1987, focused on three young Aboriginal women strolling through Sydney's King's Cross entertainment district in search of fun; juxtaposed to this, Moffatt made a film about the historical oppression of indigenous women by white men, collaborating for the first time with the Australian artist Gail Mabo (born 1965), who also worked as a dancer and choreographer in her later film Watch Out (1987).

Highly acclaimed successes with Something More and Night Cries

Tracey Moffatt created her now iconic Something More series of photographs in 1989 as a commission for the Murray Art Museum Albury (formerly Albury Regional Art Gallery). Consisting of nine photographs, six in colour and three in black and white, the work referenced the artists Russell Drysdale (1912-1981) and Albert Namatjira (1902-1959). The images use a film language and tell the story of a young woman searching for something more in life after disappointments and experiences of violence. The work brought Moffatt widespread attention and recognition for the first time. Even more successful was the film Night Cries.A Rural Tragedy (1989), which was inspired by the Australian film classic Jedda (1955) and depicts the experiences of an Aboriginal woman who is forced to care for her ageing white mother. The film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989 and is still one of the Australian artist's best-known works.

Bitter stories about deep-seated, unhealed wounds

In a career spanning more than a quarter of a century, Tracey Moffatt has created a coherent body of work in which she tells without telling, conveying her often tragic stories as hints, unspoken but palpable. In 1998, one of her largest photo series, Up in the Sky, dealt with Australia's "stolen generation", the indigenous children who were torn away from their families and given into foreign hands. The project draws on the visual language of the Italian film Accattone (1961) by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). Tracey Moffatt's work is characterised by the inclusion of often difficult themes that deal with deep-seated and unhealed wounds and are often conveyed in a tragicomic manner. Tracey Moffatt has received awards and honours for her work, including being made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016.

Tracey Moffat lives and works in Sydney and New York.