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‘Meet Me at the Upside Down Table’ Tyler Moorehead, 2018.
Interactive installation inspired by Japanese tea ceremonies and board game play, draws on the 1906 english text Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo.
Encounters nod to the guiding principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquility from Japanese tea ceremonies, encouraging visitors to ‘cherish their unpolished selves’.
Photos: Bernadette Baksa
Plywood, recycled felt, vegetable tanned leather, vintage lace and linen textiles.
At the centre of the installation is a bespoke ‘tea table’ in the form of an esoteric board game. The table was inspired by origami with leaves designed to function as a magical valise. Handmade cards guide the session.
Guidance card and sample items concealed below the flaps in the tea table designed and fabricated by the artist.
As a site-specific installation in a disused cork factory adjacent to a London Underground station, the work reached out to people living, working and passing through a cultural and commercial hub in London, SE1.
Welcome to WOOD.LAND., Tyler Moorehead, 2021
Installation Menier Gallery group show ‘Beep Beep, The end of the end of the world’
Portraits and soundscapes from the urban woods pre-imagine a warm, woodland welcome not always extended to those from ethnically diverse backgrounds.
Drawing on forest ritual and oral traditions, Welcome to WOOD.LAND. extends relational practice to sensory activism.
Conversations in nature build our capacity to challenge and re-negotiate ‘urban’ narratives which often do not include green space.
In the woods, we bear witness to our collective experience of disenfranchisement in nature. Walking together, we welcome ourselves, and inhabit the urban woods on new terms.
Enveloped by trees and life, we seek to unravel the notion that black and brown bodies are unnatural in the natural world.
Welcome to WOOD. LAND. aims to gain access to deeper research on the emotional and social connections between ethnicity and nature.
Natural soprano and bass tones from bird calls, rustllng trees, scrambling squirrels, beats on hollow logs, runners on gravel, dogs in puddles, and planes rumbling overhead.
Field recordings from Highgate Wood and Queens Wood North London.
Birds, squirrels, woodland sounds and percussion of woodland runners accompany Debi Tinsley's (www.debitinsley.com) vocal performance of Maya Angelou's epic poem 'When Great Trees Fall' deconstructed.
Portrait of participants in organza masks
Portrait in ‘protective’ red sculpted leather cape with reinforced shoulders, raised collar and orange grosgrain ribbon tie.
Speculative armour helmet with protective neck flap and chin strap.
VIDEO: POLITUS (Refined) : What we choose to remember
Tyler Moorehead, 2019. Running time 11:09
Politus is a silent performative exploration of respectability, aspiration and class, through domestic artefact.
The artist uses items to hand to reflect on the reasons why symbols of refinement might be cherished by her mother. In the process of memorialising one symbol of respectability, she is defiling another.
Politus uses the shadow of cut crystal glasses as a symbol to explore patterns of achievement, acceptability and assimilation among the black middle classes.
Seeking to acknowledge her elders, whilst denying the power of these cultural expectations over her own life, she memorialises the image of crystal glasses as symbols of belonging.
Politus was installed at Tate Modern ‘Art on Air’. The piece is a response to Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus in the adjacent Turbine Hall and takes its name from Walker’s insight about ‘what we choose to remember’.
Ocean Drifters, Tyler Moorehead & Lucy Papadopoulos, 2019 - present
Ocean Drifters is a live sound experience that uses sonic composition, real-time sound capture and embodied learning techniques to stimulate human empathy with life at a microscopic scale.
Inspired by indigenous philosophy, Ocean Drifters is a provocation, an immersion, a meditation and a collective speculation that aims to put empathy at the centre of ecology to reconnect us to the waters from which we emerged and still need to survive.
Showcased at London Design Biennale 2021 ‘Design in an age of crisis’.
AUDIO: IRCAM Paris version, 2020 10:32
Ocean Drifters is designed to help visitors connect to other species as kindred spirits, in order to stand in a more humble space as fellow earth citizens and guardians.
EMBRACE: The things that unite us.
Interactive installation of multi-sensory soft wall sculptures responding to social division.
Conceived in the wake of rising social and political divisiveness and the diminishing art of civil discourse, the artist asks: Can the universal language of the embrace step in to bridge the divide?
Visitors were invited to breach the 4th gallery wall to touch, squeeze or embrace the tactile pieces, incorporating scent, sound and responsive light.
Facilitated events invited visitors to pause together for an ‘embrace meditation’ and consider the hurts that unite all people with one another.
Photos: Liz Gorman
Responsive LED lights illuminate in presence of visitor.
‘Even on my knees’, Tyler Moorehead 2018.
An installation of community and forgiveness with its form suggested by the gates of ancient Shinto shrines.
A participatory public installation that memorialises privately shared thoughts and wishes of visitors, with the artist adding visitors’ chosen items to a canopy and tapestry that expand throughout the exhibition.
Photos: Bernadette Baksa
Bamboo cane, acrylic paint, gold leaf, natural clay, vintage linen teapot covers, antique silk kimono ties.