Tyreis Holder

About

Tyreis Holder is an Artist, Poet, Visual Storyteller and Community arts practitioner from South London, with heritage reigning from Jamaican/St Vincent.

She works heavily in mediums pertaining to installation, textiles, performance, poetry, sculpture and sound. Her practice centres around explorations of self, identity politics, generational/ancestral healing, spirituality, and the relationship with the mind, particularly within regards to navigating colonial spaces.

Primary grounds for exploration pertain to how textiles poses as poetic language, functioning as a healing device and a medium of care – specifically in relation to trauma experienced by black women.Bringing lived experiences into her practice, she aims to generate conversations around how social and intimate spaces are shaped through race, diffability*, community, heritage, class, sexuality and culture.

Poetry translates into garments, installations pose as poetry pages.

At the RCA, her project Farin : Foreign examines healing through an ethnographic lens, rooted in her experience as a Black Caribbean British queer woman of the diaspora. Drawing imagery from moments of stillness in London and her first back home in St Vincent, the work reflects on healing as a layered, non-linear process – shaped by inherited histories, cultural memory, and acts of learning and unlearning.

She explored textiles healing abilities via materials such as copper, embedded with affirming texts, and naturally dyed yarns from her heritage, such as sorrel, moringa, and turmeric. She also took inspiration of Madras, a traditional cloth used in Caribbean dress – a fabric carrying a history of movement, adaptation, and resilience. The erasure of Black archives is all too common. Honouring this fabric is a way to resist that erasure and keep this tradition, heritage, and culture alive within the Black British Caribbean diaspora.

These materials carry ancestral knowledge and quiet acts of care, through her practice, Holder resists the erasure of Black archives, weaving new, living records of the Black British Caribbean experience.

Supported by the Virgil Abloh Foundation Scholarship