Moyra Davey, Camden Arts Centre

Moyra Davey is obsessed with stuff. In her film 50 Minutes, sitting in her kitchen with her young son, she talks about “never-ending proliferating piles of paper, clothing and toys,” and “just how much we pad our lives with this stuff”. The reclusive artist, who call herself a 'flâneuse who never leaves her apartment', is continually documenting the processes of build-up that comprise a life. In her filmic and photographic work, books gather like dust and memories are collected like records. In parallel, reading and taking photographs entails an ongoing accumulation of references, quotations and narratives.

If you don't know Moyra Davey, the upcoming show at the Camden Arts Centre, life without sheets of paper is masterpiece , is an excellent opportunity to get to know her. For a glimpse of the artist herself through the lens of her work is exactly what this show offers. Her first major UK survey brings together seven series of photographs and four films, as well as Subway Writers, a brand new photographic commission depicting people writing on the New York underground. The piece will be folded, taped up and posted to the Camden Arts Centre, where the prints will retain the tape, stamps and scuffs conveyed by the journey as part of their final aesthetic.

The Subway Writers photographs originally feature at the end of her film Les Goddesses. In it, Davey's narration of the story of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters is overlaid onto photographs she took of her own sisters in the 1980s. Davey documents her life and artistic process in this way in her films, such that the two become irretrievably entwined in a cycle of collection and recollection. She is, in her work, constantly rewriting her own story.