"However, Moffatt is moving on, creatively and personally. says Moffatt, sounding pleased. I know that when I make the request to her dealer's PR. "I don't even want to do it any more," she says. she says. "I photographed into the dark. And I miss the humour. Aesthetically they are, she says, not unlike early Australian tourist brochures, or even the Golden Circle cook book (she worked at the cannery in the late 1970s – "it was good money") and those brilliant colours are revived in these photographs.Here at GOMA, she is making an exception, speaking eloquently and with deep engagement about her art, which manifests as five related series comprising Then there are photos of Cherbourg, a small town where she has much family. She likes to maintain the element of mystery. "There are Scorpios who are on the ground, a lower type, like a lizard, and then there's the eagle," she says.

It seems unlikely that a serious, highly regarded artist such as Tracey Moffatt would host a TV chat show. "But, with her latest work, a celebration of "the Scorpio's attraction to frightening energies" - symbolised by the hurricanes and explosions that appear behind many of the women - Moffatt seems to have given herself licence to let rip.Her passion for dress-ups began early, while performing in plays at church camp on the Gold Coast and continued into her teens, when she would snap photos of neighbourhood kids in Planet of the Apes costumes.Tracey Moffatt rarely gives interviews. "When I visited my family's country in central Queensland – I won't say where, I like to be vague about things – the experience of laying back on the earth and looking up …I didn't photograph the bush because how do you photograph the Australian bush now and make it interesting? Tracey Moffatt (centre), with Natalie King (left) and Naomi Milgrom. Artists have assistants, and then one thing leads to another, a little something happens. "The eagle can fly above all the crap, so I like to think I'm an eagle. "But, in many ways, Moffatt's identity is still stuck in the difficult childhood she has referenced so many times in her work, most powerfully in her short film "I'm so ashamed of [the contact sheets]," says Moffatt with a little groan, "but I had to print them. Fostered out at the age of three by her Aboriginal mother (she's never known who her father was), she was the eldest daughter in her white adopted family. So all the flaws are there. "I've had it. INTRODUCTION Tracey Moffatt is one ofAustralia’s most exciting young experimental film makers. This Babel, though, is anything but clamorous.Andrew Stephens is a Fairfax senior writer, with a focus on the arts. Cherbourg was a mission that became a government settlement in the early 1900s; it was a place where indigenous people were sent after being forced off their land. "I don't know how I could have created it." So, spiritually, I have to be in Australia more. I only ever go there for family funerals, unfortunately, but I wanted to go back alone. "I didn't want it to be talked about just in theory that my work was 'like' something," she says. For Sally Field, we see her leaning backwards over a wooden chair in her shower, dirty grouting and all.She will be living in a beach house being built for her - in the shape of a revolver - on Castaways Beach on the Sunshine Coast. That's what I'm trying to say in that photograph. In what is perhaps symbolic of her desire to finally separate herself from the shame of her childhood, she is, at 44, planning on giving up the alternative personas that have been a constant in her work.For the first time, she'll have her very own studio.Moffatt's desire to be understood is the first of several surprises in our long conversation. When, days after we speak, I read the transcript of our interview, Moffatt's intimate disclosures - on everything from her love life to her traumatic childhood and deep-seated shame - seem like breadcrumbs she's dropped on purpose in order to be discovered. "What do you think of the Hillary Clinton one, tell me?"

Her works are held in the collections of the Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales. AN INTERVIEW WITH TRACEY MOFFATT. Shot in her tiny shower and living room, they show a vulnerable Moffatt looking puffy and pasty-faced, her damp hair hanging limp above a mumsy blue swimsuit.But it's the second part of her new exhibition, at Roslyn Oxley9 from Thursday, the Being series, that provides the best insights into Moffatt's great leap forward. ""Ohhh, brilliant!" But as a performer, you have to just drop it.Moffatt has felt burned by those rare occasions when she's revealed her "dark side" in interviews. "They reveal her struggle - by turns sad, funny and plain daggy - to embody each Scorpio. she asks. To become Bjork, for example, who is pictured flying horizontally through a sky of celestial purple lights, Moffatt balanced awkwardly on a Swiss ball, her limbs flopping like a fish out of water. It's what I'm doing – pushing them to talk about their work, for the viewers to experience that as if they are personally visiting the artist." "It has a dark past," Moffatt says. For a woman who rarely talks about her own work, she does a superb job getting other artists to open up. "I was too old and still doing it," she says of dressing-up.

Artist Tracey Moffatt discusses new 'chat show' art … Each set of photographs is arranged carefully around a work by another artist she has chosen from the QAGOMA collection – works of great diversity from artists such as Arthur Streeton, Bridget Riley, Ian Fairweather, Yves Tanguy or Korean artist Yoo Seong-Ho.The Streeton is at the centre of her series She then over-printed the pictures, over-saturated the colours, tore them up and collaged them back together. (She wanted more "black girls" and has included her "heroes", the Aboriginal women Marcia Langton and Oodgeroo Noonuccal, but, sadly, US civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks and actress Cecily Tyson belonged elsewhere in the zodiac. That might be why I've become a visual artist. In 2017 she represented Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition, "My Horizon".

(He's a Scorpio as well.) Like the hammy acting, the thinking it through. She once told ABC Radio that artists can turn their "tragedies into artworks and therefore money spinners" and people bristled.