Robyn Moore

Kentucky Fellow for Visual Arts

ARTIST STATEMENT

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 work offers 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.

ARTIST BIO

Robyn Moore is a photomedia-based artist living and working in eastern Kentucky. Her work explores how alternative and experimental photographic processes can reveal the unseen worlds and beings around us. Robyn’s research interests include deep time, biosemiotics, geology, paleontology, phenomenology, empathic imagining and the ways in which images can help us facilitate understanding of and solidarity with other forms of life.

Robyn’s work has been widely exhibited, including at the South Australian Museum, National Archives of Australia, and galleries in Spain, England, and the U.S. She won the alternative processes category at the 23rd Julia Margaret Cameron Awards and was a 2022 finalist for the René Carcan International Prize for Printmaking. Her honors include a Great Meadows Foundation Grant, a Juried Residency at Grand Marais Art Colony, and residencies at Jentel, San Juan National Forest, and Hot Springs National Park.

Robyn holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney (2017) and an MFA in Photography and Experimental Film from Tufts University (2002). She is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Morehead State University in Kentucky.