Sebastian Moody: Art and Language
VAULT looks at the practice of the Brisbane artist who, for more than two decades, has used language as a medium for making sense of the world.
Image credit: Sebastian Moody, Opinion Fatigue (black feather) 2022, acrylic on marine plywood, 120 x 120 cm. Collection of Artbank. Courtesy of the artist and Onespace. Photo: Joe Ruckli
Brisbane/Meanjin residents and visitors alike have encountered Sebastian Moody’s work, even if they don’t know it. The artist is responsible for some of the city’s more memorable public artworks of recent decades. THE MORE I THINK ABOUT IT THE BIGGER IT GETS (2009) greets commuters as they approach inner-city Fortitude Valley via the Storey Bridge. Located inside an underpass along one of Brisbane’s busiest traffic corridors, the eponymous text is large enough for passing motorists to apprehend, but not accessible on foot. Nonetheless, it’s one of the few artworks that the city’s inhabitants engage with daily – and any mention of Moody’s art almost always begins with, or at least includes, this work. Rarely, however, is consideration given to the sentence’s meaning – what is the ‘it’ the artist is referring to?
Similarly, KEEP THE SUNSHINE (2014) farewells travellers as they move through customs at Brisbane International Airport. With its aluminium and LED fabrication and orange benday style dots, the work appears like a slick piece of corporate advertising; instead of selling a product however, it reminds departing passengers to hold onto the feelings of light and warmth typically associated with the Sunshine State.
Since graduating from the Queensland University of Technology into 2001, Moody has worked across a range of contexts. These include early interventions in public space, most notably Let’s leave the abject out of it, painted (without approval) on the façade of the Institute of Modern Art’s former location on Ann Street; private commissions, including a kitchen ... Subscribe to read this article in full
