“Compression also plays a role in Moir’s monotypes that feature abstract fields of tertiary and organic colours. After painting watercolour pigments onto a sheet of polypropylene plastic coated with gum arabic, Moir lays calico over the painted image. She then draws an impression by pulling a pitch roller weighing 100kg over the wet image. The water-filled roller is the same colour as the red wheelbarrow in William Carlos Williams’s 1923 poem, the barrow he claimed so much depended upon. Similarly, so much depends upon the pristine red roller in Moir’s studio.”
- Sean O’ Toole
Acts of Composition at the Threshold:
Amber Moir’s ‘Composition by Field’
The show draws from Charles Olson’s manifesto Projective Verse, finding conceptual parallels between the structure of language and the arrangement of elements in visual work. How the pieces are situated in relation to one another and empty space, their method of display and the use of various mediums are all considered formal elements in the ‘visual syntax’ of the show.
AMBER MOIR
Clear light, 2021
Watercolour monotype on calico
1025 x 1325 mm Unframed
AMBER MOIR
All acts spring, 2021
Watercolour monotype, collage on calico
1200 x 1980 mm Unframed
Moir’s latest works range broadly and deflect simple categorisation. Painting, drawing, textile and printmaking sensibilities are all evident, revealing both an adherence to and rejection of these methods.
In her first solo exhibition, In Praise of Shadows, Moir used text as a departure point for exploring fiction, space, materiality, and the role of the indistinct. Her second solo exhibition, Along the Line, deviated from narrative, exploring the notion of boundaries, as both external and self-imposed, through experimental techniques and isolating formal elements from one another.
Composition by field continues to investigate the relationship between abstract form, content and meaning.
AMBER MOIR
Intonation, 2021
Watercolour monotype on calico
1255 x 1055 mm Framed
In an extended note written on a blank page opposite Olson’s concise yet dense essay, Moir quotes the American poet’s idea of field composition as that which implies ‘a pragmatic openness to the world, and from which it follows that form is never more than an extension of content’. Reading this and other interventions, it is clear that Moir has discovered a rigorous but open language capable of articulating her process-based approach to image making.
- Sean O’ Toole
Acts of Composition at the Threshold:
Amber Moir’s ‘Composition by Field’.
Moir is a kingfisher among birds. One, two, three solo exhibitions in, she has refined an insistently haptic practice that operates at the threshold of printmaking and painting. Incubated in a nest made from flotsam of the past, her exhilarating work represents change. Or rather, as Olson phrases it in his poem about a kingfisher, ‘is change,’ a change that ‘presents no more than itself’.
- Sean O’ Toole
Acts of Composition at the Threshold:
Amber Moir’s ‘Composition by Field’.
AMBER MOIR
Wind and Silver I & II, 2020
Watercolour monotype on calico
2035 x 1055 mm Framed
