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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, and how the suggestion of an object can define a cultural point of view.
In this multi-sensory provocation, the artist speculates how fragments of family lineage and fragments of objects might converge and give way to an imaginary future.
Combining domestic items and found objects across context and culture, the artist repositions objects as speculations with no clear function, allowing imaginary narratives to emerge.
Stone artefacts with gilded bottoms are tethered to secure the tarpaulin over hessian sacks.
Hessian sacks are overstuffed to a one metre diameter with used pillows, duvets and other items of soft comfort. At 1.68m tall the hessian sacks are at human stature.
The soundscape incorporates water, birdsong and bells with a scentscape of rosemary, sage, citrus & clove to stimulate comfort and memory.
Site-specific work developed 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 steel chains 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.
Stone artefact including photograph of the artist and her family.
‘Meet Me at the Upside Down Table’ Tyler Moorehead, 2018.
Tea experience inspired by Japanese tea ceremonies and board game play. The installation and experience draw on the 1906 english text Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo advising citizens to ‘cherish their unpolished selves’.
Encounters are designed as shared reflections to encourage empathy and appreciation of a stranger over a cup of tea. The method translated the 4 guiding principles of Japanese tea ceremonies: harmony, respect, purity and tranquility, into a form of ritual play.
Sessions were guided by table cards at each position, providing a structure for guests to progress their reflections.
Benches were designed so cause guests and hosts to rise and sit simultaneously in order to ensure the stability of the shared seat.
At the end of the session, guests selected a ribbon and entered a reflection room to leave a message for future guests.
Meet Me at the Upside Down Table is a reference to displacing tablecloths to uncover both tables and truths. With the sting of protocol and discipline removed, the role of pristine, hard starched tablecloths is to hang idly as sculptures or as bench supports and do no harm.
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.
Observers peer through hangings of sculpted lace and linen tablecloths to watch progressive tea ceremony unfold.
‘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 the shared thoughts and words of encouragement from visiting members of the community to other visitors. The installation canopy and tapestry expanded as the artist added visitor contributions throughout the exhibition period.
Photos: Bernadette Baksa
Bamboo cane, acrylic paint, gold leaf, natural clay, vintage linen teapot covers, antique silk kimono ties.
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.
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.
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.
