2024
Chalk pastel on paper
96 x 90 xm

Tyga Helme was 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.’

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.