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Creating a shared practice with Alex Moss & Maggie Jeffries

Creating a shared practice with Alex Moss & Maggie Jeffries

In this podcast you will learn how artists Alex Moss and Maggie May Jeffries developed a shared creative process that bridges traditional painting and interactive media.

In this interview, Alex Moss and Maggie Jeffries discuss the creative process behind The Weather at midnight. The exhibition combines painting, projection, and real-time interaction to create a shifting environment of light and movement. Through subtle digital overlays and live painting, static canvases become dynamic, evolving works that change with audience presence. The exhibition was presented at Moonah Arts Centre.

Alex Moss is a Lutruwita/Tasmanian-based media artist whose work transforms spaces through projected light, sound design, and interactive elements. Maggie May Jeffries is a painter from Lutruwita/Tasmania whose practice explores memory, environment, and sensory experience through layered, detailed compositions.

Listen to this podcast to learn about:

  • The role of experimentation, trust, and structure in cross-disciplinary collaboration, and how shared workshops shaped Alex and Maggie’s evolving process.
  • How data, audience presence, and live performance intertwined during the exhibition.    
  • What “slow noticing” reveals about time, attention, and the perception of creative work.

Photo credits: @laura.purcell.artist

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Chapters

  • (00:00:00) Introduction to artist collaboration
  • (00:01:18) Meet Maggie and Alex
  • (00:01:52) The weather at midnight project
  • (00:04:17) Audience experience and interaction
  • (00:05:51) Inspiration and process
  • (00:09:11) Live painting and performance
  • (00:18:06) Workshops and collaboration
  • (00:23:26) Future directions and advice
  • (00:25:13) Conclusion and farewell

About Alex Moss  

Alex Moss is a media artist based in Lutruwita/Tasmania and a member of Second Echo Ensemble. With over ten years of experience, his work spans projection, sound design, and interactive installation, transforming spaces through light and sensory engagement. He has created work for the University of Tasmania, Hobart City Council, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and the Huon Valley Mid-Winter Festival. Alex received the 2023 Best Sound Design Professional Theatre Award for Outside Boy with Second Echo Ensemble. His practice explores how digital systems and performance environments shape audience perception and collective experience.

About Maggie Jeffries 

Maggie May Jeffries is a painter based in Lutruwita/Tasmania and a member of Second Echo Ensemble. Her practice explores memory, place, and the natural environment through layered paintings that merge observation with imagination. She graduated with First Class Honours in Fine Art and Psychology from the University of Tasmania in 2022. Maggie has undertaken residencies in Paris and lutruwita/Tasmania and works with artists of all abilities through mentoring and community engagement. Represented by Despard Gallery, she received the NEXT Award in 2018 and was a finalist in the 2024 Women’s Art Prize Tasmania

Takeaways from this interview with Alex Moss & Maggie Jeffries

The Weather at Midnight brings together painting, projection, and performance in an evolving collaboration between Alex Moss and Maggie Jeffries. The exhibition features two interconnected parts: Maggie’s finished paintings animated through Alex’s subtle projections and a large evolving canvas painted live throughout the show. Together, these elements form a living artwork built through data, time, and shared experimentation.
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Weather, data and process

“We used a combination of data that we collected from the weather at midnight each night to determine the colours, the brush strokes, the direction of the new painting.”- Alex Moss

Each night’s weather data shaped the development of the evolving canvas. Temperature, wind speed, humidity, and rainfall became rules that guided colour, brushwork, and texture. This method transformed environmental conditions into a creative system, turning data into both process and rhythm.

Slow noticing

“Recently while writing something about the project, I ran a bit of it through ChatGPT just to see what it would do. It came up with a phrase that I thought was a good description, which is "slow noticing.” - Alex Moss

The idea of slow noticing describes how subtle shifts in light and timing invite patience. Instead of spectacle, the exhibition rewards close attention, mirroring how details in nature gradually reveal themselves. The concept extends beyond the viewer’s experience to the artists’ own pace of making and reflection.

Collaboration as shared practice

“It’s about developing enough trust that you have your third practice that is something totally different.” - Maggie Jeffries

Through workshops and shared experimentation, Alex and Maggie created a new space of practice that sits between their disciplines. These workshops became laboratories for testing, negotiating, and discovering-a working method built on trust and continual dialogue.

Audience as co-creator

Audience presence became a live part of the work. Visitors’ movements were captured as silhouettes, projected onto the canvas, and incorporated into the painting. Maggie’s act of painting in the gallery blurred boundaries between artist and audience, transforming spectatorship into participation.

Painting as performance

“There was something really exciting about painting live in public and the conversations that I was having.” - Maggie Jeffries

Painting live in the gallery introduced a performative element to Maggie’s practice. The act of painting became a dialogue-between artist, audience, and projection.

Advice from Alex

“Work with what you have and make it happen anyway.”  -  Alex Moss

Alex’s advice centres on persistence and curiosity. He reminds artists to begin with the tools and resources available, to test ideas through doing, and to let the process guide what happens next. Progress emerges through practice, not perfection.

Advice from Maggie

“Create an open space for collaboration to develop — to let it grow naturally, with curiosity and the motivation to keep showing up.” - Maggie Jeffries

Links from this podcast with Alex Moss & Maggie Jeffries

 

Edited transcript of this interview with Alex Moss & Maggie Jeffries

How the installation works: painting, projection and alignment

Robin: What’s it like to experience The weather at midnight?

Alex Moss: The project involves 2D paintings that Maggie makes as part of the project, so there’ll be 2D paintings hanging on the wall. Then the process that I do involves taking a photograph of the painting.

I run that through all sorts of software and I do things like turn it into particles and add lights, and do all sorts of things that I think are interesting, creative. Then I carefully realign the projected image back onto the physical image.

So if you can imagine a flower with sharp lines in the painting, then when I project back onto it, all those sharp lines are perfectly realigned. When I project the images back onto the 2D artworks, I’m able to do things like make it look as if light’s coming from behind the flower, causing shadows and light rays coming out of the picture.

That’s part of the project. We’re also looking at coming off the canvas. So if we have a seed pod that’s emitting particles, it can look like pollen coming off the seed pod, and then that will also float off the canvas onto the wall, maybe even into another canvas.

Real-time interaction: audience presence as a visual input

Alex Moss: The other side of the project is an emerging painting. There’s a very big canvas, two by four metres, which started blank at the beginning of the project. We used a combination of data that we collected from the weather at midnight each night to determine the colours, the brush strokes, and the direction of the new painting that Maggie would paint.

And then we had a camera in the room to see what was happening, run through a real-time AI image generation system, projected back onto the canvas. We’d do things like pause it when we got a nice frame, and then use that to also influence the next layer of painting.

Moonah Arts Centre: the first exhibition and why subtlety matters

Maggie May Jeffries: The first iteration of The weather at midnight was an exhibition up at Moonah Arts Centre. So it was our first time getting the work into a space where we could set up and experiment with how we wanted our audience to interact with the work. But before that, we spent a lot of time working together and collaborating in workshops.

Alex Moss: I think the experience for people coming in is, at first, a bit unexpected. Most people who come in don’t really know what to expect, so they spend a little bit of time getting used to it. There’s sound, which you can hear slightly from outside as you’re coming in.

As you go in, you see paintings on the wall. We’ve tried to be really subtle. We’ve tried to make the projections relatively subtle so that they emerge out of the painting, sometimes unexpectedly. Sometimes people come in and think, “Okay, I’m just in a gallery looking at pictures hanging on a wall,” but then something moves. They have to look twice, and then they start to realise: hang on, something else is going on in this space that isn’t what I thought it was going to be.

I think that’s what engages people. Some of the feedback we got from the Moonah Arts Centre people was that people spent longer in there than perhaps usual.

One of the things we try to do, and this is to do with the subtle approach, is that it requires attention, in a way that’s perhaps more than what people are used to. The way the projections are designed is that there are fairly long pauses. We want to catch people off guard so they turn back and look at the work and say, “Well, did I just see that? A flicker of light?”

Or we want people—

Maggie May Jeffries: —to be pleasantly surprised, or curious if they’re looking at the works, and then to be waiting in the space to see what else is going to happen.

Slow noticing: time, attention and perception in immersive art

Maggie May Jeffries: It mimics some of the inspiration and motivation for these things. We both have this shared sense, or experience, of noticing things in nature — the way light reflects off water, the way shadows move — that kind of thing. If you’re not too busy thinking or focusing on something specific and allow your attention to be drawn to what’s interesting.

That’s why we say The weather at midnight relates to process and theme. There’s a crossover of how we’re making the work and how we want the work to be experienced, coming from that theme of being patient in natural environments for details to emerge, or being curious enough to spend more time. It requires time to find those details, which is what inspires all of my paintings, and then inspires the projections that go alongside.

Interestingly, I was writing something about the project the other day and I ran a little bit of it through GPT just to see what it would do, and it came up with a phrase that I thought was really cool: “slow noticing”.

Alex Moss: So we kept that one in there.

Maggie May Jeffries: That is what we’re trying to say — we’ve been saying it in more complicated ways.

Collaboration workshops: building a third practice between painting and media art

Robin: When I visited the space you were actually working on the painting. If you hadn’t been there, I would’ve been seeing more of those types of images come through.

Alex Moss: Yeah — and because it’s a camera and it’s real time, another aspect of experiencing the show is that you can see your silhouette, or your presence, influencing the visuals that happen on the canvas.

But it’s another one of those things: if you went through super quickly, you might not notice that was you. We hope people spend time with it and realise, “Hang on — if I move over to this side of the room, all of the images kind of change and follow me.”

So there’s an element where people’s presence are actually influencing the artwork, both in real time and in terms of capturing those freeze frames. Someone might be in the room when Maggie’s painting, they make a pose, we hit pause, and then that layer includes what happened at that particular moment as well.

Robin: The idea of taking the weather from a time and then building a set of rules around that is very much like coding — you’re making art through the process a rule. Was that something that you thought about Alex, or was that Maggie, was that something when you thought about that, how did that sort of appear?

Maggie May Jeffries: I remember when we had that idea in our workshop and you had come up with, we were trying to think of ways that we could incorporate a live painting element to The weather at midnight project.

I think you came up with using weather data, because a lot of my painting process happens at night. I do paint during the night and when it is still and quiet and I can’t be distracted by anything. I can just focus on what I’m meant to be doing. It sort of made sense that would happen.

And then Alex did come up with the title, The weather at midnight, and we were both just like, “That’s the best name ever.” It’s such a good name. We have to do that.

That’s why we decided to collect the data for the weather at midnight. So for the duration of the exhibition at Moonah Arts Centre, I was staying up till midnight to take a screenshot of the weather right on 12 o’clock. Sometimes there’s a couple minutes either side, depending if I put my phone down and put the kettle on or something, and then that would give me the data to come in the next day and do some more painting on the ongoing painting.

Alex Moss: Well, yeah, I mean, previous to this project, I’ve kind of been interested in data visualisation. I like the idea that you can take something that’s already happening and present that in different ways.

And also I’ve been recently delving into the world of TouchDesigner, which is a program where you can build environments that do whatever you want ’em to do. So I’d seen this idea of connecting data to visualisations and sounds before.

Something that I’d really like to experiment with further is automating all that — not necessarily staying up and taking a screenshot, but just pulling the data directly into TouchDesigner.

Posted 25-10-2025