The Sorry State

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.