Tamsin Avra is a multimedia art maker based in Washington, DC. Her primary medium is watercolors paired with hand-sewn glass beading. Though she has painted and created artworks her entire life, she has never received any formal training. Her influences are many, but include Paul Klee, Gunther Anders, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Hilma af Klint. Tamsin’s work is often inspired by reflections on spectacle, catastrophe, power and prophecy.
Artist Statement
I am moved, in one way or another, by the tension between the simultaneous inevitability and unthinkability of catastrophe which provides the basis of modern life on Earth. My multimedia artworks are therefore an attempt to think the unthinkable, which is to say, anticipate catastrophe “so that it may become false,” which is to say, they are meant as a preemptive eulogy.
Each piece seeks to describe the aforementioned tension and its teleology through the use of two contrasting media - watercolors and sewn glass beading. I work with watercolors for the reason that they are difficult to control. The shapes they produce engulf, permeate, and crash into each other. It is important to me to include an element in my work that is beyond me - not easily manipulated. The use of sewn glass beading in my work, then, serves a dual purpose. It forces a slow tedium in my process, resisting the impulse to create efficiently, and imbues each piece with a sense of the infinitesimal, meticulous, and linear.
My artworks, ultimately, are my reflections on the prophetic - a practice which intends to foresee disaster so that it can be made false. Understood like this, there is no reason to portray disaster in a tragic or melancholy way. There is still time for it to be averted. This is the most important aspect of my works - an undying hope which recognizes the limitless contingency of the future.
