Shattering the naivety of childhood

Rites of passage: Detail from 'Tracey Moffatt - Birth certificate, 1962'.

Now based in New York, Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia's most successful artists, earning international recognition for photography, films, print-media and video installation.

She has had both a short and feature-length film screened at the Cannes Film Festival and has exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

Like film-making, her photographs are made with sets, technicians and actors, a process she has worked with since 1973 when she was 13 years old, persuading siblings and cousins to dress up for photographs in front of tableaux scenes she created in her Brisbane backyard.

This early start allowed her 2003 retrospective at Sydney's MCA to span 30 years of work.

She has described the Scarred for Life series, which her Mixed-Up Childhood pictures are taken from, as "a series of images about tragic, funny tales of childhood".

They are all based on actual occurrences related to her by friends.

These narrative pictures depict potentially pivotal moments that contribute to a child's self-image.

These traumatic experiences often contain an innocent humour, such as Doll Birth, 1972, which depicts two boys simulating childbirth and carries the caption: "His mother caught him giving birth to a doll. He was banned from playing with the boy next door again."

A more poignant work, not included in Mixed-Up Childhood, features a teenage girl cleaning a car with the caption: "Her father's nickname for her was 'useless'."

Moffatt's simple suburban vignettes, with their brief narrative descriptions, open up myriad possibilities.

These are like rites of passage; momentary events when childhood naivety is shattered by an adult perspective of reality; experiences that may have serious psychological after-effects later in life.

In considering the ambiguities, how closely does the image of the incident match its telling, and has the tale retrospectively gained revisionist implications in its re-telling?

Scarred for Life plays with the way distorted recollections of youth can become a tool in the self-mythologising process, conveniently explaining shortcomings or successes in adult life.

Although presented in the style of photo-journalism, mimicking the page spreads of Life magazine, there is no mistaking the synthetic nature of these images with their anecdotal uncertainties.

Tellingly, Moffatt often uses traditional printmaking techniques, such as silkscreening and photolithography, to reproduce her photos, adding a painterly edge and highlighting the element of artifice.

Since making the works in 1994, more and more people have wanted to tell her about their similar experiences, so a second series, which was exhibited at Gow Langsford Gallery, was made in 1999.

Exhibition

* Who: Tracey Moffatt, in Mixed-Up Childhood
* Where and when: New Gallery, to May 29