Tracey Moberly
Encyclopedia
Tracey Moberly is an interdisciplinary artist, author and radio show host, and was also a co-owner of the Foundry
in London. She exhibits prolifically and is best known for her work with mobile phone SMS text messages around which her book Text Me Up! is based. Moberly’s art is often described as socio-political.
(1985), and an MA in Art as Environment at Manchester Metropolitan University
(1996), where she also lectured during the 1990s. Since 2001 she has lived and worked in the East End of London.
Moberly produces work in a broad range of media including brickwork, glass, thread and fabric. She has run workshops at the Natural History Museum
on spinning and dyeing from natural dye stuffs such as vegetables. Her work with spinning and dyeing lead to a collaboration with comedian Shazia Mirza
on F*** Off, I'm a Hairy Woman, an hour long television documentary presented by Mirza in which the artist spun and made over 80 lingerie garment sets out of human hair. The resulting catwalk show became the unofficial opening of London Fashion Week in Spring 2007. Tracey has made poetry from bricks and has made sculpted bricks that make up the structure of buildings. She also works in steel, iron & glass. A recently favoured artistic medium is intricate embroidery which she is using in a project titled Text-Me-Up-Sex-Drugs & Rock’n’Roll.
Billboard ‘Beaver Espana & Summer of 69’ advertising campaign was successfully stopped as Moberly organised a graffiti campaign to add the safe sex slogans that she thought were missing from the advertisements.
With comedian Mark Thomas
, Moberly has set up McDemos, a 'protest solutions company' for those whose modern lives are too busy to protest themselves. One of their first actions was to commission UHC Collective for a mass cover-up of street advertising hoardings in Manchester. McDemos has been closely involved in the campaign to abolish the British SOCPA law (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005), turning protest into an art form inside the SOCPA zone around the Houses of Parliament. Moberly has organised workshops at Tate Britain
on the theme of Art as Protest and she has lectured on the subject at Sheffield Hallam and Manchester Metropolitan Universities.
Tracey Moberly and Mark Thomas arranged an exhibition in which they extended an open invitation to artists to re-imagine how Coca-Cola's advertising in Nazi literature and at Nazi events would have looked (originals are hard to locate). The resulting exhibition included hundreds of artworks and was first shown in the Foundry in June 2004. It has since travelled widely, being shown in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Russia. The Grocer reports that Coca-Cola disputes the facts presented in the exhibition but the company has taken no action against Moberly and Thomas.
. From this material she has produced a series of exhibitions and art interventions. The first, Text-Me-Up! was held in Mancheser in 2000. This was followed by Text-Me-Up-Too! in The Foundry, London, December 2001, in which text messages received by her were printed out onto long scrolls, creating a temple-like installation. Text-Me-Up-3! (2001) and T4XT-M4-UP-MOR4... (2002) involved launching balloons to which were attached randomly-selected text messages. Text-Me-Up-Five! included the participation of four other artists - Danny Pockets, Jaime Rory Lucy, Dunstan Bruce and Moira Minguella. In this show Tracey meshes the new technology of SMS text messaging with the traditional craft of embroidery. The show opened at the Foundry in May 2006, then moved to the Nancy Victor Gallery in London and later to the Hastings Arts Forum.
Her text message collection is the subject of a book by the artist, Text-Me-Up!, published June 2011. The work is structured around three narratives - archived text messages from the past, current text message conversations, and an autobiographical text, beginning and ending in Manchester and covering the last eleven years of Tracey’s life in London’s East End
. The book describes her collaborative practice with notable figures from popular culture including Alabama 3
, Banksy
, Tony Benn
, Pete Doherty
, Bill Drummond
, Howard Marks
, John SInclair
, Gavin Turk
and Martyn Ware
.
Foundry (bar)
The Foundry was a bar and venue on Great Eastern Street at the junction with Old Street in Shoreditch, London. It was owned and run by Jonathan and Tracey Moberly. Bill Drummond, co-founder of the KLF, helped set up the Foundry. It had a basement which hosted art, music and poetry events...
in London. She exhibits prolifically and is best known for her work with mobile phone SMS text messages around which her book Text Me Up! is based. Moberly’s art is often described as socio-political.
Overview
Tracey Moberly achieved a first-class honours degree in Art and Design from Newport College of ArtUniversity of Wales, Newport
The University of Wales, Newport is a university based in Newport, South Wales. The university has two campuses; Caerleon on the northern outskirts of the city and a £35 million campus on the banks of the River Usk in Newport city centre opened in 2011...
(1985), and an MA in Art as Environment at Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester Metropolitan University is a university in North West England. Its headquarters and central campus is in the city of Manchester, but there are outlying facilities in the county of Cheshire. It is the third largest university in the United Kingdom in terms of student numbers, behind the...
(1996), where she also lectured during the 1990s. Since 2001 she has lived and worked in the East End of London.
Moberly produces work in a broad range of media including brickwork, glass, thread and fabric. She has run workshops at the Natural History Museum
Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum is one of three large museums on Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London, England . Its main frontage is on Cromwell Road...
on spinning and dyeing from natural dye stuffs such as vegetables. Her work with spinning and dyeing lead to a collaboration with comedian Shazia Mirza
Shazia Mirza
Shazia Mirza is a British comedian and columnist from Birmingham, England.-Background:Shazia was born as the eldest daughter in Birmigham to Pakistani parents, Mohammed and Sarwat Mirza...
on F*** Off, I'm a Hairy Woman, an hour long television documentary presented by Mirza in which the artist spun and made over 80 lingerie garment sets out of human hair. The resulting catwalk show became the unofficial opening of London Fashion Week in Spring 2007. Tracey has made poetry from bricks and has made sculpted bricks that make up the structure of buildings. She also works in steel, iron & glass. A recently favoured artistic medium is intricate embroidery which she is using in a project titled Text-Me-Up-Sex-Drugs & Rock’n’Roll.
Activist art
Tracey Moberly's artwork has been selected to profile a number of topical but difficult to approach activist campaigns. Whilst in some of these her work has been used indirectly to publicise issues, in others she has used her work to fight directly on behalf of an issue, using art as activism. In the past the Club 18-30Club 18-30
Club 18-30 is a holiday company owned by Thomas Cook that offers cut-price holidays for young men and women who seek a more lively holiday than those offered by many large package holiday providers. It takes around 110,000 guests each year with turnover of around £50m a year...
Billboard ‘Beaver Espana & Summer of 69’ advertising campaign was successfully stopped as Moberly organised a graffiti campaign to add the safe sex slogans that she thought were missing from the advertisements.
With comedian Mark Thomas
Mark Thomas
Mark Clifford Thomas is a left-wing English comedian, presenter, political activist and reporter from south London. He first became known as a guest comic on the BBC Radio 1 comedy show The Mary Whitehouse Experience in the late 1980s. He is best known for political stunts on his show, The Mark...
, Moberly has set up McDemos, a 'protest solutions company' for those whose modern lives are too busy to protest themselves. One of their first actions was to commission UHC Collective for a mass cover-up of street advertising hoardings in Manchester. McDemos has been closely involved in the campaign to abolish the British SOCPA law (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005), turning protest into an art form inside the SOCPA zone around the Houses of Parliament. Moberly has organised workshops at Tate Britain
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
on the theme of Art as Protest and she has lectured on the subject at Sheffield Hallam and Manchester Metropolitan Universities.
Coca-Cola's Nazi Adverts Exhibition
- "Coca Cola GmbH (Germany) collaborated with the Nazis. The company advertised in Nazi papers financially assisting the regime. They opened up bottling plants in Sudetenland shortly after the Nazis had invaded. They exhibited at Nazi trade fairs. And in 1941 when Coca Cola GmbH could no longer get the syrup to make Coke from America they created a new drink out of the ingredients they had available to them. That drink created for the Nazi soft drink market was Fanta." (Coca Cola's Nazi Adverts - Art Exhibition 2004 press release)
Tracey Moberly and Mark Thomas arranged an exhibition in which they extended an open invitation to artists to re-imagine how Coca-Cola's advertising in Nazi literature and at Nazi events would have looked (originals are hard to locate). The resulting exhibition included hundreds of artworks and was first shown in the Foundry in June 2004. It has since travelled widely, being shown in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Russia. The Grocer reports that Coca-Cola disputes the facts presented in the exhibition but the company has taken no action against Moberly and Thomas.
Text Me Up!
Moberly has worked with SMS text messages for the last decade. She has saved every text message she has been sent since her first in 1999. From this material she has produced a series of exhibitions and art interventions. The first, Text-Me-Up! was held in Mancheser in 2000. This was followed by Text-Me-Up-Too! in The Foundry, London, December 2001, in which text messages received by her were printed out onto long scrolls, creating a temple-like installation. Text-Me-Up-3! (2001) and T4XT-M4-UP-MOR4... (2002) involved launching balloons to which were attached randomly-selected text messages. Text-Me-Up-Five! included the participation of four other artists - Danny Pockets, Jaime Rory Lucy, Dunstan Bruce and Moira Minguella. In this show Tracey meshes the new technology of SMS text messaging with the traditional craft of embroidery. The show opened at the Foundry in May 2006, then moved to the Nancy Victor Gallery in London and later to the Hastings Arts Forum.
Her text message collection is the subject of a book by the artist, Text-Me-Up!, published June 2011. The work is structured around three narratives - archived text messages from the past, current text message conversations, and an autobiographical text, beginning and ending in Manchester and covering the last eleven years of Tracey’s life in London’s East End
. The book describes her collaborative practice with notable figures from popular culture including Alabama 3
Alabama 3
Alabama 3 are a British band mixing rock, dance, blues, country, and gospel styles, founded in Brixton, London, in 1995. In the United States, they are known as A3, allegedly to avoid any possible legal conflict with the country music band Alabama...
, Banksy
Banksy
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique...
, Tony Benn
Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood "Tony" Benn, PC is a British Labour Party politician and a former MP and Cabinet Minister.His successful campaign to renounce his hereditary peerage was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963...
, Pete Doherty
Pete Doherty
Peter Doherty is an English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist. He is best known musically for being co-frontman of The Libertines, which he reformed with Carl Barât in 2010. His other musical project is indie band Babyshambles...
, Bill Drummond
Bill Drummond
William Ernest Drummond is a Scottish artist, musician, writer and record producer. He was the co-founder of late 1980s avant-garde pop group The KLF and its 1990s media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation, with which he burned a million pounds in 1994...
, Howard Marks
Howard Marks
Dennis Howard Marks is a Welsh author and former drug smuggler who achieved notoriety as an international cannabis smuggler through high-profile court cases, supposed connections with groups such as the CIA, the IRA, MI6, and the Mafia, and his eventual conviction at the hands of the American Drug...
, John SInclair
John Sinclair (poet)
John Sinclair is a Detroit poet, one-time manager of the band MC5, and leader of the White Panther Party — a militantly anti-racist countercultural group of white socialists seeking to assist the Black Panthers in the Civil Rights movement — from November 1968 to July 1969...
, Gavin Turk
Gavin Turk
Gavin Turk is a British artist and one of the Young British Artists . He often uses his own image in life-size sculptures of famous people.-Life and work:...
and Martyn Ware
Martyn Ware
Martyn "Teddy Bear" Ware is a British musician and music producer. He is the chairman of a local football team: PPA. As a founder member of both The Human League and Heaven 17, he was partly responsible for hit records such as "Being Boiled" and "Temptation"...
.
Containing work by the artist
- Agit Disco, Stefan Szczelkun (ed.) Book (forthcoming from Mute magazine)
- Haiti Ghetto Biennale, Photo essay by Tracey Moberly in Dazed & Confused April 2010
- Coke repeating by Tracey Moberly in Frontline Latin America September 2006
- New Zapatistas: on the campaign trail with Subcomandante Marcos by Tracey Moberly, Dazed & Confused, July 2006
- 5 magazine, curated by Gavin Turk featuring work by Tracey Sanders-Wood and Moira Minguella (August 2004)
- SIC - Adventures in Anti-Capitalism (October 2002, Book Press; ISBN 1-900672-01-4)
- Too Much Spirit, in The Idler, issue 27 - Everybody Loves a Fool (September 2000, The Idler; ISBN 0-9536720-2-6)
- Navigating the Terror by John Hyatt, with contributions by Tracey Sanders-Wood (July 2000, Ellipsis; ISBN 1-899858-66-0)
- Stalk with Sue Hubbard (September 1999, Manchester Metropolitan University; ISBN 1-900756-07-2)
- Give Battle In Vain co-written with Prof John Hyatt (April 1999, Manchester Metropolitan University; ISBN 1-900756-08-0)
- Innovation and Tradition - Fine Arts in Manchester (February 1999, Manchester Metropolitan University; ISBN 1-900756-07-2)
See also
- Criticism of Coca-Cola - Nazi Germany and World War II
- SMS text messages
- Protest artProtest artProtest art is a broad term that refers to creative works that concern or are produced by activists and social movements. There are also contemporary and historical works and currents of thought that can be characterized in this way....
- The FoundryFoundry (bar)The Foundry was a bar and venue on Great Eastern Street at the junction with Old Street in Shoreditch, London. It was owned and run by Jonathan and Tracey Moberly. Bill Drummond, co-founder of the KLF, helped set up the Foundry. It had a basement which hosted art, music and poetry events...
External links
- sanderswood.com Tracey Moberly's website
- Text-Me-Up! on Beautiful-Books.co.uk (publisher)