A History of Dispersals (2025)
A History of Dispersals is a series of self portraits and abstract landscapes with local ecologies. In this collection of works on paper I recompose and reimagine Soufrière’s distinctive Caribbean landscape (home of the Pitons) using photomicrographs of plants growing in the London Docklands, connecting the origins of both of my parents through marine life and water. A minimalist enquiry, a pattern of sequential reductions using photo etching, chine collé and blind emboss printmaking processes. The full sequence explores notions of (degrading?) memory, imprinting, touch, distance, duration and the (in)durability, transformation and reconstitution of memory – and what remains: sense impressions, feelings, traces left by people and places that continue to change with me.
Adam Moore, Dispersal III – II – II (2024). Photoetching and chine collé on paper 565 x 375 mm.
Adam Moore, Dispersal III – II – III (2024). Photoetching and chine collé on paper 565 x 375 mm.
Adam Moore, Dispersal IV – I – I (2025). Photo etching and chine collé on paper 565 x 375 mm.
Adam Moore, Dispersal IV – II – I (2025). Photo etching and chine collé on paper 565 x 375 mm.
Adam Moore, Dispersal IV – IV – I (2025). Chine collé and blind emboss on paper 565 x 375 mm.
Deeply personal, A History of Dispersals is also a quiet meditation on the indurability, transformation, and reconstitution of memory, contemplating what happens to the impressions made upon us by people and places as time passes, and what remains as memories inevitably fade. The result of my experimental, post-minimalist approach to printmaking, developing from traditional lithography techniques from photo etching to chine collé, I progressed to the monochrome blind emboss through a series of sequential reductions. Dispersal V – IV – VII (2025) was presented in the group show Las Palabras at Somers Gallery, London, in October 2025.
Adam Moore, Dispersal V – IV – VII (2025). Blind emboss on paper 565 x 375 mm.
Dispersal V – IV – VII was created at the University of East London print workshop at the London Docklands campus. The plants living in the biodiverse water habitat at the docklands, where the series of unique works and editioned prints were made, are the same motifs depicted and transforming throughout the collection of works on paper. One example of how I use my situated research and practice to create artworks that embody and expand notions of site. Dispersal V – IV – VII was developed from my research at the V&A Research Institute and V&A Museum archives and collections, and my situated research with ecological technology designers Biomatrix Water Solutions, as the inaugural V&A East X Bow Arts artist fellow (2023-24) exploring local ecologies and materials in Newham, and refined during the inaugural V&A East Storehouse Collections residency in 2025.
Adam Moore, Dispersal V – IV – VII (2025). Blind emboss on paper 565 x 375 mm.