Trained at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal Drawing School in London, where she won the Machin Foundation Prize, Tyga uses nature as a metaphor for feelings of being overwhelmed. She couples minute observation of the teeming forest floor – where the emerald green of a bramble leaf sits in stark juxtaposition to an array of cold blue silver leaves – with the flux and movement of unceasing growth. She switches from the micro to macro and a particularly favourite subject is a clump of Douglas firs near where she lives which she views from underneath, highlighting their dark and jagged canopy against the azure sky.
‘The untidy areas are the exciting bits,’ says Tyga who lives on the Wiltshire Downs where she seeks out the uncultivated corners of fields or patches of woodland floor to paint. ‘Things really do spring up in one day and everything constantly shifts around,’ she says. ‘Grasses and brambles make way
for animals; a shoot is there one day and gone the next because an animal has eaten it. A mushroom suddenly appears from nowhere. Everything is in a relationship with everything else.’
A rising star in the new British Landscape movement her works embodies an awakening to the importance of the ground beneath our feet.
Although Tyga lives and works in the UK she won an Erasmus scholarship to study at the L’Ecole Nationale Superieue des Arts Decoratifs in Strasbourg and for more than a year taught at the International Institute for Arts, Modinagar in India.
Her work is held in held in a number of important collections including the Royal Collection.
3 – 26 November
We are delighted to welcome Tyga Helme to our Emerging Talents Programme for her debut solo exhibition with Messums London.
Trained at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal Drawing School in London, where she won the Machin Foundation Prize, Tyga uses nature as a metaphor for feelings of being overwhelmed.
Upcoming
‘Bucolia’ Blue Shop Cottage
‘Forces of Nature’ Glyndebourne
2021
‘Unkempt’ Messums Wiltshire
‘Inside|Outside’ Janet Rady
2020
‘50 x 50’ The Auction Collective
‘Avoiding the Hodgepodge’ Crean and Company
‘On the Strangest Sea’The Violet Hour
‘All These Gestures’ Bowes-Parris
‘On Paper’ On Paper Gallery
‘Sky So Close’ Blue Shop Cottage, London
‘A Dream is not a Dream’ Purslane
‘Reaction in Seclusion’ Reaction
‘The Birds are Singing in the Distant Woods’ The Violet Hour
RI Painters in Watercolours, Mall Galleries
Derwent Art Prize, Oxo Tower Wharf
2019
Forton Fine Art, Hampshire
Royal Institute of Watercolours, Mall Galleries, London
Auction Collective, Menier Gallery, London
Pastel Society Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
2018
CAS, London
Salon 63, London
Draw, Mandells Gallery, Norwich
Fresh Paint, London
Mylo, Hampshire
OM New Contemporaries,Marlborough
Forton Fine Art, Stockbridge
The Pastel Society Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
Drawings from Le Mepris, Piccadilly Arcade, London
Extraordinary Sketchbooks, Mount House Gallery, Marlborough
2017
Artreach, Bikaner House, Delhi
CAS,London
Turmeric: Four British Artists in India, Daniel Raphael Gallery, London
Residency, Sanskriti Kendra, Delhi
2016
Breathe In Residency Show, Sevenoaks School, Kent
Lynne Painter-Stainers Prize, Mall Galleries, London
Sevenoaks IB, The Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf, London
Drawings from the Royal Drawing School, Christie’s, New York
2015
Drawing In, Mount House Gallery, Marlborough
Marking Spaces, St Peter’s Mission Hall, London
Drawn from the Fleming Collection, The Fleming Collection, London
The Moving Space Between, London Morgan, London
Tyga Helme
SOLD
Tyga Helme