Jai Moodie
Artist Residency

Working through repeated walks and experimental routes, Moodie will build an inventory of photographs, drawings, found materials, sounds, overheard conversations and observations. Attuning himself to the changing moods of the street, and alive to unexpected connections and visual rhymes, he will collect its “textual run-off”: dialogues between graffiti and older forms of mark-making, ancient routes and contemporary desire lines, geological formations and the traces of human activity left by those who have passed through a place.

The project asks what might happen when we encounter the familiar places we call home through a different, heightened state of attention. Following paths travelled across generations, Moodie is interested in moments when the contemporary city seems to slip out of chronological order: when an ordinary road, fragment or found object becomes a point of contact with lives and landscapes that preceded it. These encounters open up other ways of reading the city, tracing connections across time while creating space to imagine alternative possibilities for its present and future.

The residency will support Moodie to develop this research alongside an expanded photography and printmaking practice, exploring processes of layering, overprinting, repetition, erasure and transfer. Through these experiments, fragments gathered while walking can be reworked and brought into new relationships, allowing the printed surface itself to echo the city as something accumulated, overwritten and continually remade.

His work as an artist will develop in dialogue with his teaching practice at Hampstead School, exploring how this methodology might be shared with students and expanded through their own experiments and perspectives.

Working under the provisional title Visionary Encounters in South London, and in conversation with writers, artists and walkers from Thomas De Quincey to Johnny Pitts, via Julian Cope, Moodie’s project explores walking as a way of reading the everyday city against itself - uncovering histories, traces and imaginative possibilities that continue to inhabit its streets and surfaces.