Diane Smyth on A Sorry State for 30 Years of Photoworks.
2025
Does your condition affect your washing and bathing? Does your condition affect you using the toilet or managing incontinence? These are just two of the questions UK citizens are asked when applying for aid from the Welfare State, typically posed by strangers. Jack Moyse finds the process intrusive and demeaning and has fought back with his work, mapping the relevant scenarios with his own body then shooting at a distance. Peeping through doorways or watching long-distance through trees, his imagery suggests the surveillance to which he and others are subjected; using images to raise awareness, he also suggests the camera as a liberatory tool. Moyse’s staged still lifes materialise the rhetoric that surrounds disability, meanwhile, and his layered artworks the trappings of bureaucracy. Here he is presenting new images of his installations, especially made for Photoworks.
Born in 1996, Moyse is based in Swansea, Wales, and holds an MA in photography from Plymouth College of Art. His practice focuses on the lived disabled experience, providing insight into and exposure for those marginalised in the UK, and the oppressive systems they encounter. Moyse has exhibited at Ffotogallery in Cardiff, Mission Gallery in Swansea, and Belfast Exposed; he was recommended to Photoworks by Joanne Coates, who won the 2022 Jerwood/Photoworks Awards alongside Heather Agyepong.