Artist Bio
Tamara Robertson
Tamara was born in Houston and has lived in the south, west, north and east regions of Texas. As an artist, much of her influence has come from everything she sees, feels and experiences while living in and exploring the diverse landscapes of the southern United States. Tamara now lives and works beside a rural lake located among tall, sky sweeping pine trees. She talks about her current body of work below. “My current body of work had its genesis in road trips to re-experience the rural landscape after my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 colon
cancer and handed a three year life expectancy. While I use a variety of materials and processes in each work, my concept is consistent. The objects I make are placed in the canon of modernist art and guided by making visible what is often overlooked. This work is aesthetically grounded in an observation of our surroundings, revealing the beauty of commonplace objects, placing them in a context which allows them to be experienced anew — perhaps never to be viewed mundanely again.
While I am not landscape artist in the traditional sense, my work makes use of the natural and man
made components found within the natural terrain — for example, tree branches, soils, shells, time patinated objects, etc. Being an observer of my surroundings has allowed me to take the frame of the familiar and create a process that points to the uniqueness of forms hidden in plain sight. I have found both planned designs and unexpected discoveries to be useful in the rearranging of familiar materials. These evolve into poetic objects whose expressive pattern is experienced before being recognized as individual familiar building blocks that compose an unfamiliar form.”