Tamara Tyrer is a moving image installation and performance artist.
Tamara Tyrer’s practice explores female subjectivity and interiority. Tyrer's work examines female gesture and movement, often exploring intermedial spaces between stillness and motion, dance and cinema, narrative and non-narrative.
Using the medium of immersive film installation, and also live performance, Tyrer's work re-visions and recuperates images of women from film, dance, mythological and cultural history. The work evokes the imaginary, the fictional spaces in our minds and inner world. The practice explores how this imaginary is influenced by the external and internal imagery around us – films, fantasies, stories, myth and fairy tale.
Tyrer’s practice examines a female interior space-time through the use of such filmic techniques as slow motion, sound, circular timescapes and loops in order to explore and re-vision a female subjectivity. The films aim to create images as corporeal, sensory experiences through movement and sound. Through immersive and visceral evocations of female subjectivity, the work aims to explore alternative visualities that move away from a phallocentric paradigm of occularcentrism and objectification.
Tyrer has a PhD entitled 'Of Space and Time: Film and the Female Perfomer' from Central St Martins, London.
Tyrer's work has been exhibited at, amongst others, Fisura Experimental Film Festival (Mexico City), The Lethaby Gallery (London), The National Gallery (London), The Courtauld (London), The V&A (London), ERBAN, Galerie des Beaux Arts, Nantes (France) and The Rochelle School (London).
Tamara Tyrer has given papers, presented her work and taken part in panel discussions at: The House of Fairy Tale's 'The Great Imagining' at Gavin Turk's Studio, London; 'Revisiting the Gaze' Conference at Chelsea College of Arts; 'ErotICA' at The ICA; 'Style Lounge' at The V&A and The Spotlight Symposiums at Central St Martins UAL, London.
As part of Tyrer's practice she also created Whoopee, a pioneering and radical immersive and fantastical site-specific experience, juxtaposing a nighclub, live art and dance with burlesque, cabaret and vaudeville traditions. For Whoopee, Tamara directed and co-produced shows at, amongst others, The Blackpool Tower Ballroom, The Blackpool Grand Theatre, The Blackpool Winter Gardens, The V&A, The ICA, The Thames Festival, Fierce Performing Arts Festival (Birmingham), The Great Eastern Hotel, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Hackney Empire, The Porchester Baths and The Atlantic Bar.
Tyrer has written a chapter with Lara Clifton, entitled 'The Whoopee Club', in an upcoming publication (March 2025): Sex on Stage. Performing the Body Politic (Bloomsbury Academic). Edited by Alison J. Carr and Lynn Sally.
Tyrer is an Associate Lecturer at Central St Martins, UAL, London.
For more information on Tamara's work, get in touch.