Tamar Payne

About

Tamar Payne uses sampling and layering of their own photography in their work, juxtaposing the repeated imagery of contemporary culture with the single moment of a painting, often placing a female presence at ease with itself (neither passive or assertive) within the contemporary sublime. There is a foreboding sense that all may not be well in Tamar Payne’s neo-romantic works where the sublime, once eternal but now fragile, suggests vast landscapes at a point of no return. Tamar Payne plays with formal aspects of image making, flatness, recessional space, materiality and surface.

The artist has recently brought the figure back into their landscapes, as active self portraits of forms taking up negative space, subverting the genre of the nude as an objectified and colonised subject of the male gaze. Tamar Payne’s process starts with life drawing, reducing the figures to silhouettes and later paper and digital stencils.

Tamar worked as a producer/director at the BBC and writer for Channel 4 before studying contemporary art practice at Brighton School of Art and Chelsea, UAL. She has exhibited in group shows and had her first solo exhibitions in 2022 at RuptureXibit in Kingston and the WIA Gallery Sussex. Attending Grenoble University as an undergraduate and time spent living in Switzerland developed Tamar’s interest in glacial landscapes.

In July 2026 Tamar Payne is due to attend an artist and scientific residency in the Arctic, a focal point of the decolonisation of nature and landscape.