Senior Lecturer, Painting, School Academic Lead: Enhancement
Moyra Derby is an artist working with painting and pictorial conventions, testing propositions about the attentional capacities of painting. Painting is approached as spatially responsive and durational, extending the experience of viewing and exploring the relationship between perception and the processes of memory and imagination. Often works are spatially expansive and space responsive; free standing double sided structures, folding paintings, cut panels, multi component and overlapping set ups that resist the work being seeable in one go. The modulations of attention, with its gaps and glitches, focus and dispersal, inform this approach. The painting methods tend to be indirect, using image transfer including screen printing, tracing and stencilling. This restriction helps to negotiate painting’s investment in abstraction while also claiming its mimetic potential.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, and currently undertaking a practice based Phd at the University of Kent, Moyra is a founding Trustee of Crate Studio & Project Space in Margate, and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Contemporary Painting.