Rebecca Moss is an artist based in Essex and East London (b.1991, Essex).
She is interested in absurdity, and is drawn to working with precarious, unstable and moving forms. She is especially interested in how absurdist humour can resist, and emotionally express the challenges of living in a late capitalist age. Through humorous and site-responsive ideas, her work explores existential themes, with projects taking a wide variety of forms across sculpture, video, performance, installation, and participatory practice. She is often drawn to the carnivalesque, with its temporary suspension of societal rules, and the playful inversion of hierarchies. She is especially inspired by slapstick performance: for its emotional expression of feelings of instability, its lowbrow humorous associations, its sense of reciprocity between body and surroundings, and for its potential to challenge power.
In an ongoing series of videos, she stages bodily interventions in the landscape with props, everyday objects and fancy dress costumes, which she performs to the camera. These works emphasise non-hierarchal interactions between the human gesture, elemental forces, architecture and the natural world. She sets up scenarios where she relinquishes a degree of control, collapsing the human-as-dominant, and the outcome is often surprising.
Her participatory work uses humour as a point of connection, engaging diverse communities and marginalised areas, who may not ordinarily experience artistic activity. She is especially excited by projects where art is encountered in unusual and unexpected places.