Gabrielle J Moore

Gabrielle J Moore’s paintings carry a rare, complete vision, one that moves instinctively between materiality and subject, between the seen and the unseen. Narrative doesn’t simply thread through her work - it hums, tilts, surfaces. Scenes form around found images and lived experience, charged with a quiet surrealism that is both comic and unsettling.

This is a practice alive with its own frequencies: psychic rituals, social commentary, dreamscapes. The work resists single interpretation, offering instead a layered, intuitive world where story, memory, and the unconscious meet. Moore is not borrowing from the world, she is building one of her own.

Education

Fine Art BA (Hons) 2014 New Blood Art Commentary, Cardiff School of Art and design (2014)

Artist statement

I am interested in images that sit on the verge of telling a story - moments that invite the viewer to pause, question, and look more closely. I often work from my own photographs, capturing fleeting instances that I want to suspend and preserve through paint. Alongside these, I draw from found imagery, particularly old true crime photographs and books on the paranormal. These archival images, with their obscure settings and ambiguous narratives, create unsettling worlds where stories seem to be hinted at but never fully revealed. They often possess a strangely staged quality, blurring the line between documentation and fiction. Through painting, I aim to intensify this sense of uncertainty, creating works that encourage curiosity and a desire to uncover what lies beyond the image.

I am equally interested in the material qualities of painting. My figurative works often remain deliberately unresolved, allowing areas of the underlying surface to remain visible. Whether painted on Perspex, metal, or canvas, the support becomes an active part of the image, as if the painting is gradually emerging from the material itself. This tension between image and surface reflects the incomplete, elusive nature of the narratives I seek to create.

Selected exhibitions