Tamsin Morse, Class of 1989, graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1998 and subsequently received an MA in 2004 from Chelsea College of Art and Design.

She has won the Arts Council London Grant for the Arts – Individual – for Tales of Hoffman 2006, was shortlisted for John Moores in 2004 and the Red Mansion Foundation Award in 2004 and won Hong Kong City of Life in 1998. She has also been reviewed in Time Out magazine by Martin Coomer 2006 for her solo exhibition at One in the Other as well as in Contemporary Visual Arts, Art Monthly and in The Slade Journal. In 2004 The Art Review named her as one of Britain’s top twenty five young artists.

Tamsin’s paintings are involved with mythology and anthropology. The invented landscapes explore a world on the edge of reality, suggesting an historic presence of inhabitance, perhaps by an unknown tribe. Amongst the rocks and forests are patterns, like scars, bearing the remnants of an undefined culture, nodding towards ceremonial activities of the past.

Recent paintings have been animal portraits from cave paintings, symbols of fetishistic idealism of objects. Just as the holy mounds in the landscapes explore mans inherent quest for worship and pilgrimage, the speculative role of ancient animal paintings in caves have appeared to historians and archeologists as universal symbols of worship.

The paintings’ relationship to drawing and indeed the drawings themselves mimic early etchings which were used by explorers as factual evidence of their discoveries, much as the camera does today. Constructed from tiny dots which crawl over the territory, the paintings are ominous and slightly sinister.