about

This is an archive page from when this blog was also my website. My website is now at: tamsinhaggis.com

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Despite having started my professional life at art school, I've spent a great deal of my life not painting, drawing, dancing, or playing music. There was related activity. In 1986 I worked at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, Dharamsala, North India, and between 1991-1994 I studied Indian Art and Philosophy at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London. In 2009, however, painting finally erupted into my life and insisted that I stop what I was doing (being an academic in Education). Since then I've been trying to follow this insistence. For the first few years I wrote a blog about my ongoing trials, Exploring Creativity, and for the first couple of years this was accompanied by a photostream on Flickr. My facebook page is now where I put my ongoing explorations.

The paintings on this site have been selected from the Flickr site and the Facebook page. Collected together under themes, they're chronological, with the most recent paintings at the top of each section. I'm fascinated as much by process as I am by results, so have left the chronological story here, despite there being so many images.

In September, 2013 I had my first solo exhibition in the Stirling Fringe Festival at The Yoga Tree, Stirling Arcade, Stirling.





I trialled my sand painting here for the first time.















Recently I've been working on ideas around the idea of Human Life.  Having been exploring the fractal forms of wet paint, echoing cells and membranes, seashells and coastlines, ecosystems and galaxies (the subject of Wild Life),  I'm now thinking about how to place humans in the midst of this fractal complexity.




How to suggest the idea that human beings are but tiny specks in this vast universe?
To challenge the Biblical idea of humans having dominion over nature (the idea that nature is 'there' for
humans to use and exploit).




How to express the idea that as humans we are not distinct from plants, or trees, or animals, or viruses?
To challenge more recent idea about human connection to nature. I'd like to somehow give visual expression to the idea that the human/nature relationship goes far beyond the idea of connection - that humans are nature. The clouds, the frozen ice, your toe, the milk in the glass, your feeling of hurt, the grass beneath your feet; that it's all the same stuff.




How to suggest the free, joyous potential of being a speck of human consciousness in a connected universe?





How to suggest the coexistence of the dark with the light, of death with regeneration, of cycles rather than progressive trajectories?





Might it be possible to allude to what happens when none of this is considered: when as humans we live our lives feeling distinct and separate?





Some more ruminations on these questions here, here, here, and here. and an article about my Marcelle House studio in 2014 here.  A more recent assessment of the questions here.







As well as my solo exhibition, Wild Life, in the Stirling Fringe Festival in 2013, I have also shown work in The Loft Restaurant, Stirling, and have a piece on permanent display at Roots Cafe, Stirling, whose logo I designed. I have designed logos for PPC, Edinburgh; Creative Exchange, Edinburgh; Bruce Britton; and The Propel Network, Stirling University. My work has been used on a poetry pamphlet cover, a PhD thesis, and as CD covers for Mairi Campbell's Pulse and Dan Mandel's fundraising CD for Doctors Without Borders.  I was involved in the Ecstasis project at the MacRobert Centre, Stirling, in 2012, and in 2015 exhibited as part of the Marcelle House Collective at the ARC Gallery, Stirling Arcade. This year I also collaborated with Anne Ryom and Rachel Amey.  I created a number of images for Rachel Amey's Edinburgh Festival show Peacock Blue which were projected behind Rachel as she was performing.

I have over 50 paintings and prints in private collections.

In 2015 I'm continuing to focus on this next phase of my work and will have minimal involvement in public forums and exhibitions. But if you're interested in what I'm doing please get in touch at tamsin.haggis@gmail.com.

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I would like to dedicate all of the work on this site to my teachers and friends David Reilly, Kath Burlinson,  Lorna Penney, Paul Oertel, and Nancy Spanier. I'm blessed to have been able to benefit from the extraordinary example of your lives and being.