Your Custom Text Here
‘Even on my knees’, Tyler Moorehead 2018-19.
A participatory public installation that celebrates vulnerability. Its form suggested by ancient Torii gates of Shinto shrines.
Vintage teapot covers are hardened and converted into ‘bells’ with items selected by visitors in private sessions hung as bell clappers.
Inspired by Japanese shrines, the installation canopy and floor tapestry expanded as new visitors shared their stories or reflections. Their contributions sewn or woven alongside others in place as a growing shrine on public view.
Visitors are invited to read or contribute to the words of encouragement woven into the tapestry by other visitors. They are asked to take a moment for reflection and acknowledgement of the hurts and scars that all humans share.
Photos: Bernadette Baksa
Even on my Knees, 2018 Bamboo cane, acrylic paint, gold leaf, natural clay, vintage linen teapot covers, antique silk kimono ties.
A visitor reads reflections woven by other visitors into a floor tapestry.
Expanded canopy during visitor participation.
I Can't Remember Where I Came From: Objects as thresholds to past memories and imaginary futures, Tyler Moorehead, 2024.
Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's 1968 text, 'The System of Objects', the artist explores how we define and relate to fragments of objects.
In this multi-sensory provocation, the artist speculates how fragments of family lineage and fragments of objects might converge.
Liminale describes a state of limbo when one becomes slowly untethered from one's authentic origin story, as adopted identities of affinity and fancy fuse into one.
At the centre of the installation is a large, transient structure matching the artist's precise 1.68m stature. A tarpaulin, light ropes, five heavily stuffed hessian sacks and a collection of stones share the burden of support.
The search for grounding one's own memory of identity is juxtaposed with artefacts of no provenance, period or purpose, constructed entirely from the detritus of other objects. These include natural stones converted into artefacts of memory with gold painted bases, industrial metal fragments and family photos embedded.
The multi-sensory installation uses natural soundscapes incorporating water, birdsong and bells with a scentscape of rosemary, sage, citrus & clove to stimulate comfort and memory.
Liminale is the Italian word for 'liminal'.Stone artefacts with gilded bottoms are tethered to secure the tarpaulin over hessian sacks.
Site-specific work for the Casino Nazionale, Lucca Province, Italy.
Supported by Borgo Degli Artisti.
Assembled tarpaulins, stones, fragments and sacks are transformed into objects of value and significance.
Natural rock painted with gold metallic base, printed photograph and attached metal piece becomes a stone artefact, an object of memory.
Stone artefact made from natural rock with gold acrylic and fragments of other objects.
Speculation for an ancient - or futuristic - artefact used as head piece.
I Can't Remember Where I Came From, 2024. BREASTPLATE: Vintage cast iron, table linens, found objects and beading.
Stone artefact including photograph of the artist and her family.
VIDEO: POLITUS (Refined) : What we choose to remember
Tyler Moorehead, 2019. Running time 11:09
Politus is a performative exploration of respectability, aspiration and class, through domestic artefact.
The artist uses items to hand to reflect on the symbols of refinement cherished by her mother. In the process of memorialising one symbol of respectability, she defiles another.
Politus was installed at Tate Modern ‘Art on Air’ as a response to Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus in the adjacent Turbine Hall. The piece takes its name from Walker’s insight ‘what we choose to remember’.
The silent piece 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, the artist memorialises the image of crystal glasses on a fine linen tablecloth as a symbol of belonging.
Ocean Drifters, Tyler Moorehead & Lucy Papadopoulos, 2019 - 2022.
Ocean Drifters is a live sound experience that uses sonic composition, real-time sound capture and embodied learning to stimulate human empathy with life at a microscopic scale.
Inspired by indigenous philosophy, Ocean Drifters is a provocation and a collective meditation that aims to place empathy at the centre of ecology to reconnect us to the waters from which we emerged and still need to survive.
Ocean Drifters aims to use the transcendence of felt experience to rekindle human relationship to underwater primordial life.
Tens of thousands of marine creatures drift our ocean waves to feed and to breed. Many of these are the microscopic plankton that make up 90% of all marine life, and which form the foundation of our ecosystem.
Sonic submersion invites participants to temporarily recapture their place within the infinite ambiguity of the ancient ocean.
Ocean Drifters opens a speculative enquiry into the serious question of human impacts on marine organisms’ ocean drifting way of life. The soundscape accompanies abstract marine scapes and uses an array of analog and digital sounds, including the sound of air guns and found materials in the sea, to convey the distortion of sound in ocean water.
As part of this speculation, the reflective phase of Ocean Drifters asks visitors to respect intuitive forms of knowledge, trusting their own experience of physical vibration and sound as one valid form of understanding.
Showcased at IRCAM, Paris, 2020 and included in ‘Design in an age of crisis’ selection at London Design Biennale 2021 .
AUDIO: Listen to an Ocean Drifters Sample soundscape.
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.
Welcome to WOOD.LAND., Tyler Moorehead, 2021
Portraits and soundscapes from the urban woods pre-imagine a warm, woodland welcome not always extended to those from marginalised groups.
Welcome to WOOD. LAND. aims to gain access to deeper research on the emotional and social connections between ethnicity and nature, and the environmental implications of exclusion.
Drawing on forest ritual and oral traditions, Welcome to WOOD.LAND. creates conversations in nature to build 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.
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 a deconstruction of Maya Angelou's epic poem 'When Great Trees Fall'.
Portrait of wood walker in ‘protective’ red sculpted leather cape with orange grosgrain ribbon tie.
Intimate and relaxed fittings to open conversation, formed part of the methodology for portraits and relational research.
Portrait of participants in organza masks
Protective cape from sculpted and fired leather offcuts is lined with vintage Japanese brocade.
Portraits of wood walkers in protective armour
Welcome to WOOD.LAND. sound installation, Menier Gallery, 2021.
‘Meet Me at the Upside Down Table’ Tyler Moorehead, 2018-19.
Tea experience and installation inspired by Japanese tea ceremonies and board game play. The piece draws on the 1906 english text 'Book of Tea', by Okakura Kakuzo which invites citizens to ‘cherish their unpolished selves’.
Four principles of Japanese tea - harmony, respect, purity and tranquility - become a form of ritual play in which guided reflection encourages empathy and appreciation of a stranger, over a cup of tea.
At the centre of the installation is a bespoke ‘tea table’ in the form of an esoteric board game. Tablecloths are displaced to uncover both the table and the truth. With overshadowing etiquette removed, pristine tablecloths hang idly as frozen ceiling sculptures, where they can do no harm.
Benches fashioned from bales of vintage tablecloths are designed to cause guests to rise and sit simultaneously as they move around the table. Forcing them to act in solidarity to ensure their mutual stability.
Photos: Bernadette Baksa
Plywood, recycled felt, vegetable tanned leather, vintage lace and linen textiles.
Bespoke tea table and guidance card.
Example items concealed within the flaps in the tea table designed and fabricated by the artist.
The site-specific installation in a disused cork factory adjacent to a London Underground station, accessible to people living, working and passing through a cultural and commercial hub in London, SE1.
Observers peer through hangings of sculpted lace and linen tablecloths to watch progressive tea ceremony unfold.
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.
