Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Moriah LeFebvre. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Moriah, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I have known since my earliest memories that I wanted to pursue a creative path. Creativity and art have always been innate and irrepressible parts of me. As a child, I spent my time drawing, writing stories, or performing on stage. These avenues for creation allowed me to fully lose myself in the present moment in a way that felt so necessary to me. Spending too much time in my head has never been the path to meaningful happiness for me! That said, losing myself in the moment has had it’s downsides too! I remember once, in fifth grade, I started absentmindedly sketching on my desk in pencil. I loved the way the pencil looked on that glossy surface. Being a child of the ’90s and a fan of TLC, I began to draw a large and detailed portrait of T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli, complete with all of the lyrics to “Waterfalls” encircling their faces. I’ll never forget the feeling of coming abruptly out of this artistic flow-state to my teacher’s sharp, shocked tone as she asked me, utterly baffled, what I was doing. I still remember the smell of that cleaning solution and the way the words and their faces looked as I wiped them back into nonexistence.

I learned that there are rules around when and where we can create, but I also learned that creativity itself was not optional for me.

I left home at sixteen to attend the UNC School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, and had the opportunity to fully immerse myself in the visual arts. The idea of having a profession that was not in the arts, just did not make sense for me. There are challenges and downsides to being in this field, but I cannot imagine doing anything else. It is a path that is so rich and fulfilling for me and I get to do something different nearly every day. I have never been one to stick with just one approach, modality, or medium, which is why I identify most as a mixed media artist.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a mixed media artist who lives and works in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. In addition to my own creative practice, I am a mother of twin boys who are my world and have broadened and enriched my life in countless unexpected ways. I spend much of my time outside with my kids throwing a baseball or kicking a soccer ball, which is a sentence I never thought I would say. I spend much of my weekends on the sidelines at their games, engrossed by sports that I had no previous interest in, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am also an instructor at institutions ranging from the Durham Arts Council to Durham Technical Community College. Over the years I have taught courses including darkroom photography, digital photography, 2D Design, mixed media, painting, drawing, and art appreciation. No matter the particular form it takes, I love to serve as an intermediary between people and art, sharing with others the passion for the thing I love most.

In my own work, I utilize a range of media to explore various themes, including transience, identity, interpersonal connection, and home. My work runs the gamut from mixed media works on canvas to hand-drawn (or hand-painted!) animation.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Art gives me so much. I truly cannot imagine existing in this world without it. Art is how I process the things I see, feel and experience in my life, as well as the things I witness in the world around me. It gives me a means for communication and expression on a deeper level. There are so many rewarding things about being an artist that it is hard to pick one.

I have an exhibition this month at The Fruit in Durham that is a ten-year retrospective of my project, ”Hometown (Inherited).” The show will run through May 20th. This project was born in my early days of motherhood. After having twin boys in January of 2013, the lens of my worldview changed. As a new mother raising children in my own hometown, I found myself struck by the realization that the Durham of my childhood looked so different from the Durham of theirs. All around us the environment was in an active state of flux. I kept encountering locations in which the transition was evident; change appeared to be accelerating. These were glimpses of something elusive that I felt should be captured. I began to take a series of photos of local parents and their children in these transforming landscapes, starting in April 2014 with an image of myself and my one-year-old twins in a clear cut forest in north Durham. From these images, I created a series of mixed media pieces, each composed of 20-24 photographic prints layered and collaged onto canvas or, later, glass, and then hand-painted with acrylics. In my more recent works in this series–2020 through 2024–I have incorporated cyanotype prints and drawings into the works, collaged, layered, and painted in the same approach as the earlier works.

I was awarded the 2015 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Award in support of this project, and, in the years since, have created a body of forty mixed media pieces that serve to capture and preserve fleeting moments in this time of ever-escalating environmental transformation. This retrospective debuts many of the newer works that have not been exhibited previously, and is my first retrospective of the decade-long project. Having the opportunity to exhibit the results of ten year’s worth of labor and love, is rewarding beyond words. My favorite part of this project is how it has included so many different community members in the telling of this story—our story. It has become not just a way of preserving the moments of these environmental changes, but a way of still-framing the transience of our lives as well. Little ones appear in these images who are no longer so little and the pieces become a part of both our community histories and our personal histories as well.

Having the opportunity to share this work with my community, within a building that has witnessed nearly one hundred years of Durham’s history, epitomizes what is so rewarding to me about being an artist.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I have had to unlearn my own assumptions about my capabilities. The fact is that I am *not* a technophile. Never have been and likely never will be. I have often felt like I was meant to have been born in an earlier era because of this. When I was a kid I preferred to type my stories on a typewriter rather than a computer. For years I refused to make the switch to digital photography. In part, analog is just my natural orientation and always my preference. But also, the fact is, that fear and self-doubt play a huge role in this for me as well. When I encounter a new technology, a part of me always freezes and my brain tells me the story that I am incapable of learning this new thing.

I began my higher education at Durham Technical Community College (where I now teach!!), then UNC and, ultimately, returned to school in 2019 to pursue my Masters in Fine Arts at Duke University. Being at Duke pushed me outside of my comfort zone in countless ways. Coming up through the Durham Public School system, then public art school, then community college, then a public university, being at a private institution like Duke was not a space that felt familiar to me; I had to confront my own preconceived notions of myself in regards to abilities, class, and worthiness. New technologies were a big part of that for me.

The MFA|EDA program I attended at Duke (Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts) was heavily photography and filmmaking centric. As a person whose background is primarily in still, 2D work (drawing, painting, mixed media, and photography), I pondered whether or not I should explore filmmaking. It was the assistant director of the program there, Ted Mott, who first encouraged me to explore animation. In the simplest terms, there was a way I could take the drawings that I was already creating, and make them move. He showed me “I, Destini,” thesis work of former MFA|EDA grad Nicholas Pilarski; I was riveted and profoundly inspired. I felt, while watching this film, that animation enabled this story to be told in a way that no other medium would have. I decided to attempt to figure out how to do this, outside of any animation course or formal instruction, but with resources available to me through networking within this grad school environment. And here’s where my own technophobia reared up. Yes, I could draw and paint each of my frames by hand, but I would have to tackle new technology in order to run these frames together into moving images. And so, one step at a time, I did. The ultimate result was my film, “by & by,” which juxtaposes the story of my great-grandmother’s twin boys, whose lives were lost to eclampsia in China in 1919, with that of my own twin boys, who survived the same fate a century later in the United States. This film was my thesis work, and, within the last year, I have returned to this project and created a new iteration of the film which is fully translated into Chinese. Later this spring, I will have the opportunity to screen this film at the Nanjing Massacre Museum, bringing my great grandparents’ story full circle. If I had continued to believe my own assumptions about my capabilities, and let them stop me, none of this would have ever happened. The lesson for me has been not so much about confidently believing in myself, but, instead, about being willing to take those first steps, and the subsequent steps that follow, despite whatever doubts are rattling around in my head.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://moriahlefebvre.com/
• Instagram: @moriah_lefebvre_art
• Other: https://www.patreon.com/moriahl

Image Credits
Original images by Moriah LeFebvre