PROJECT: MOHA
Duration: 1998-Current
“What we are all looking for in art is to rediscover the atmosphere of our first communion.”
– Paul Cézanne
MOHA, the Mother of High Art, is a long-form, multi-platform project proposing that art is not a career, a commodity, or a cultural product. It is a devotional practice. A religion for those who create.
The project emerged from a private reckoning. In my late twenties, I stopped making art entirely, finding it impossible to reconcile the intimacy of creative practice with the commercial systems surrounding it. When I returned to the work years later, those tensions remained. The rise of artificial intelligence sharpened them into something newly urgent. If a machine can generate images, write prose, and compose music, the question of what art is actually for becomes impossible to avoid. MOHA is the answer I have been working toward.
The Book
At the centre of the project is The Book of MOHA, a work of philosophical fiction structured like a founding text. It follows a group of artists who encounter MOHA, an archetype, a presence, a character who appears at moments of creative crisis, and find their understanding of their own practice fundamentally altered. Drawing on art history, spiritual traditions, and the sociology of belief, the book proposes that authentic creation is a devotional act. It holds this proposition with equal measures of sincerity and irony.
The Avatar
MOHA exists as a persona I inhabit across social media, constructed from my own image and animated by the authority of a spiritual figurehead. She is a mother, a teacher, a cult leader of sorts. The visual language draws deliberately on cult imagery, mind-control aesthetics, and the architecture of belief systems. The intention is not parody. It is an examination of why such structures compel, and a redirection of that power toward something of use to artists navigating a genuinely destabilising moment.
The Feeds
The feeds are produced entirely through artificial intelligence. The figure of MOHA is me and not me: AI-generated images built from my likeness, a synthesised version of my voice, image-to-video and text-to-voice tools assembling a presence that has never existed in a room. Nothing is real. Everything is presented as real. This is deliberate. A project about authenticity in the age of AI, delivered by an AI construction, carries its own argument without needing to state it.
The content spans a wide range of formats: philosophical explanations of the book, spells, infomercials, pop songs, spiritual animations, wacky talks, and dispatches from the MOHA Temple. Some is earnest. Some is absurd. The two are rarely separable. MOHA occupies the same attention economy that threatens artists and operates differently within it.
