TOAF takeover

#TOAFtakeover : Rachel Moodie

Welcome to #TOAFtakeover, an Instagram series that gives you an insight into the work and life of our artists.

Hi! I’m Rachel Moodie and I am happy to be today’s TOAF takeover artist! This is a digital collage called ‘Headland Reverie’ and it is both self portrait and the re-imagined memories from old photo albums.

I use the name Darling Mills Studio as our little cottage / tree house in the Western suburbs of Sydney backs onto Darling Mills Creek. This is the view out over the creek which constantly amazes me. The momentary changes in light, the shifts in the sky, drifting clouds and the calls of the birds are pretty inspiring.

My latest body of work is called the Reverie Collection. It came about when I was given a pile of old photo albums that belonged to my Great, Great Aunts… They travelled the world by sea between 1937 and 1938 prior to the outbreak of World War II. I knew I had to do something with them; reinvent them and pay homage to their memories.

This piece is called ‘Oceanarium’. This woman was in an old photo from Italy circa 1937. There was just something about her stance that I liked. Besides the old photos from my last post I also work with grainy old gardening books. I scan the images and blow them out to get the turquoise texture you see in the foreground. At The Other Art Fair Sydney this year a handful of people said they thought this piece was very Irish and this surprised me as I lived there for a while in my early 20’s!

At the fair I was commissioned to make another work that went with ‘Oceanarium’ and to print it on a tile. This piece is called ‘The Sisters’. It reminds me of my sister and I, and it nods to the two sisters who travelled the sea and whose photo albums I inherited. All my collages are limited edition Giclee prints on archival paper or prints on matt ceramic tiles.

This is an earlier work from a roadtrip taken across Australia in 2008. A few months after the trip I attended a design conference where a speaker explained how she used Photoshop as a tool to collage and sketch ideas. I liked this concept and began collaging my trip photos as a ‘sketch’ for future paintings. They became my Australiana Collection and are the dream like compositings of my travel memories.

To get off the computer and back to a more analogue form of collage I have taken my digital collages, painted them with encaustic beeswax and recollaged them with fabric, stitch, paint, crayon and old watch parts. This one is a called ‘One Cloud’ and was inspired by a recent trip to Manning Point.

Thanks for having me The Other Art Fair. If you like my work you can find more @darling_mills_studio or take a look at my website. Have a great week!

Follow The Other Art Fair and catch #TOAFtakeover every other Tuesday on Instagram at @TheOtherArtFairAus

Follow Rachel Moodie on Instagram at @darling_mills_studio