Robyn Moore

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 exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including at the South Australian Museum, the National Archives of Australia, FotoNostrum Gallery in Barcelona, Spain, the Centre for Print Research in Bristol, England, the Houston Center for Photography, Soho Photo Gallery, The Halide Project, The Image Flow Photography Center, Remarque Print Workshop, Manhattan Graphics Center, Washington Printmakers Gallery, and the Bradbury Art Museum at Arkansas State University where her work was recently awarded the Lindquist Purchase Award. In 2022 Robyn’s work was selected as a Finalist for the René Carcan International Prize for Printmaking and exhibited at the Bibliotheca Wittockiana, Brussels, Belgium. Additional awards and honors include a Great Meadows Foundation Artist Professional Development Grant, Honorable Mention for both “series” and “single image” in the alternative process category at the 18th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Awards for Women Photographers, a Juried Residency award at Grand Marais Art Colony, a full fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, and residencies at the Jentel Artist Residency Program, San Juan National Forest, and Hot Springs National Park. 

Robyn holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia (2017) and an MFA in photography and experimental film from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (2002). Robyn is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky.

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.