Luke Moody

My practice is informed by ways of working in both art and anthropology though I’d position myself firmly in an ‘interpreter’ over ‘translator’ of something ‘other’, its a kind of mediating performance. As I have broad and sometimes wandering interests I attempt to personally restrict my works by selecting particular location fields (sometimes literally) – They provide frames for research-praxis and readings of human narrative traces that pass through it – films, journeys, habits. The subject of my work tends to be things lost or simply absent within a chosen field. I then perform some form of historiography to get closer to the absent - a practice of ghosting – donning the white sheet and getting into the skin of things past.

I’m interested in the self-reflection of Latour’s ethnography of scientists, a method of studying method that will bring out something beyond what that method may provide. I try to inhabit and embody techniques to recognise the media of cultural interpretation. This is a sometimes paradoxical way of working: Trying to construct (something) whilst defamiliarising oneself with the parameters that are constructing the approach to that (something) – in that sense, I guess what I do comes close to the experimental archaeology of Thor Heyderdahl. This empirical guesswork takes form when the ‘other’ that interests me is barely traceable, or even removed from the world (torn down, blown up, extinct or wiped out by genocide). The work I make relies upon some form of tracing, enacting, following – I look for trails in media such as drawings, films and ruins - ephemeral evidence of inscription: film as history, drawing as evidence, building as ideology.

-Luke W Moody 2011