ARTIST STATEMENT
Brighton Based Visual Artist and Printmaker Moatzart
why i make prints
PRINTMAKING​
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I am Alexandra Motiu and I make art under the pseudonym Moatzart, a Brighton based printmaker and illustrator with a fine arts background, working with original printmaking techniques, mainly relief, wood engraving, with experience in etching, metal engraving and monotype.
My work has surreal qualities and humour, with an old masters' feel. I aim to make hauntingly beautiful work that will stay with the viewer for a long time. I enjoy busy compositions with complex stories, which I build up like a collage. My works are often rooted in myth and folklore.
Ultimately, my main inspiration is people, portraiture being at the root of all my prints, from where their stories often develop.
Lately, I am focused on using traditional printmaking techniques as a method for uncovering hidden stories of the past, related to labour, and labour rights. Illustrating them through my printmaking practice offers unique insights into what work looked like in the past, and what it could look like in the future. This has helped me understand printmaking as a practice of resistance, where slowness, care, and repetition are at the centre. It has also helped me connect deeply to its history as a trade, and better understand its laborious nature.
The process uniquely allows me to be directly connected to my work and the fruits of my labour, and I am passionate about preserving the knowledge of the entirety of this mode of production.
I love documenting and sharing the printmaking process, in a way that is accessible, and showcases the care behind it. I am hoping to make these techniques more known, and offer them as an alternative to the fast-paced world we are in.
other influences
COLLAGE AND INSTALLATION
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I also have a strong history of a collage practice. When I first started making work, I was using found materials and images, and looked to Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, The Chapman Brothers, Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst, and publications like Toilet Paper Magazine.
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At Brighton university, I became focused on deskilling and appropriation art, and started working with found objects. One of my biggest projects was The Toy, where I found the original toy that Damien Hirst modelled “Hymn” after, and reaffirmed it as a toy, by presenting the various ways it could be played with, like a reciprocal ready made (using a Rembrandt as an ironing board).
RELATIONAL AND SOCIALLY ENGAGED WORK
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I also have a history of experimenting with participatory projects, as I became interested in Heideggerian ideas about the subject and object, and I encouraged the public to interact with my work either by stealing it or through becoming part of it.
I experimented with the terrain of relational art, and developed “anti-relational” works, where I work with the public to the completion of the work, but present it in a way which goes against the relational aesthetics tradition. I would like for my practice to become more and more socially engaged as it matures, and for my background in fields like painting and printmaking to help in their aestheticization, in the way of socially engaged projects which have an aesthetic and symbolic result, such as the practices of Renzo Martens, Michelangelo Pistoletto, or Serge Attukwei Clottey.
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I admire projects like The Mini Factory by Stuart Whipps, where a community of workers was mobilised to the creation of the project and often think about how my work could grow on a larger scale, and how printmakers, as a group with a traditionally laborious practice, could contribute to impacting workers today, inspiring them to advocate for themselves.
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