On 16 February 2024, the artist Patrice Moor, together with the Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Thought Network, will launch The Presence of Absence in the St John’s College Exhibition Galleries in Oxford. The exhibition has been commissioned as part of the Network’s Wollheim Centenary Project, which receives support from St John’s College, University of Oxford, from the Independent Social Research Foundation and, as a Local Partner, from the Royal Institute of Philosophy. The exhibition, lasting three weeks, will be accompanied by talks on philosophy and psychoanalysis, situated around the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim (1923-2003). There will also be events referencing Moor’s work as an artist.
In this very personal exhibition, Moor creates collages with photographs, stitching and drawing to explore a psychological dimension in her work that expresses a suffered childhood trauma. Her mother died from a hereditary heart condition two weeks before Moor’s second birthday. The tragedy was met with silence and repression, intensified by a staunchly Catholic upbringing. She refers to her childhood as “a desolate landscape of prosperous neglect.”
The installation pivots on a powerful group of five large works, depicting the artist on her second birthday blowing out the candles on her cake. They are supplemented by a large collection of small collages that dissect details from the dominating images. The differing viewpoints challenge the notion of a single perspective and encourage the viewer to analyse their own reactions thereby echoing the discrepancies that arise in a family narrative.
Working from her North London studio, Moor describes her collages as a process of ‘destruction and reconstruction.’ The medium gives her the freedom to explore the source of her grief with a child-like naivety, by cutting and rearranging the pieces in a playful manner. Her use of red yarn evokes blood, referencing both her lineage and the cause of her mother’s death from a ruptured aortic aneurysm.
The exhibition offers a highly unusual expression of a young child’s grief. It allows a window into the internal world of ‘the child in the adult’ and the everlasting engagement with loss. Moor’s depiction of this perspective is of great interest to philosophers and psychoanalysts through its acknowledgement that trauma plays a pivotal role in a child’s development, and how ‘meaning-making’ occurs prior to a child’s attainment of language. It acknowledges the role of art as a mode of powerful expression.
Moor has been artist in residence in institutions both in London and at the University of Oxford, most recently at the Department of Pharmacology and at Lincoln and Somerville Colleges. The Presence of Absence is Moor’s most self-revealing and ambitious exhibition to date.
More about Patrice Moor and her artwork can be found here.
The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project 