Tabatha Andrews MRSS

Tabatha's work visualises energy and unsettles the hierarchy of the senses, transforming many different sites and contexts. She won the RSS First@108 Public Art Award in 2015 to make two sculptures for Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London responding to the theme of Memory. The first, 'The Dispensary,' is a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ designed for Alzheimers and Dementia patients. Part tool-cabinet, part dressing table, bureau or fridge, this sculpture uses play as a means of accessing our unconscious or ‘procedural’ memory and aims to create pleasure in the moment. Through a series of workshops with the artist, patients made Rorshache ink-blot forms that were transformed into tactile objects by the woodturners of Devon and Cornwall; handles, finials and toy- like forms designed to inspire memory, movement and interaction. You can see a wonderful film about the project by Liberty Smith at https://vimeo.com/181069269

In 2015 Tabatha ran 'Among Remote Lost Objects', an ACE-funded project exploring resonance and non-resonance, involving the blind opera singer Victoria Oruwari and composer John Matthias (shown at ROOMartspace London and KARST Plymouth). She was a commissioned artist on the ‘Bideford Black’ project with Flow Projects and the Burton Museum in Devon, making large performative drawings with this extraordinary pigment.

Recent work has explored the differences between hearing and listening and the production of sculptural 'scores'. In 2018 she received a Kings College London Innovation award for her collaboration with the Streit Lab on the theme of hearing and communication, which culminated in the aural performance Stillpoint (a performance for one) at Somerset House Cultural Institute in 2019, involving the choreographer Katrina Brown. She also collaborated with the composer Charlotte Harding on Antiphon, a live vocal performance that resonated the stairwell of Science Gallery London for the Spare Parts exhibition on prosthesis (2019).  

Tabatha Andrews was Artist in Residence at Gloucester Cathedral in 2002-3 and has made work for the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trust, the Whipple Museum of Science in Cambridge, the Monument to the Fire of London, Plymouth Art Weekender and many other venues. Tabatha studied at Glasgow School of Art, Slade School of Art and Skowhegan School of Art, Maine USA.  She lectures at the University of Plymouth and Falmouth School of Art.