TanOren
My work is rooted in lived experience—as a disabled, working-class woman from a small mining village in North Wales—and shaped by a need to challenge the way stories are told and received. I create figurative and mixed media pieces that draw from memory, fantasy, and personal history, but I never aim to illustrate a fixed narrative. Instead, my work serves as an open invitation: a visual space where viewers can connect, interpret, and construct their own meanings.
I explore themes like body image, stereotypes, and cultural identity, often using collage and text to merge the visual with the verbal. This layering reflects the complexity of individual and collective experience. I’m interested in the tension between past and present, and how one image can hold multiple truths depending on who is looking and when.
As a self-taught artist, I am constantly experimenting—with materials, ideas, and perspectives. My practice is both a form of personal expression and social engagement. Nothing pleases me more than hearing a viewer’s interpretation of a piece—it is in these exchanges that I learn, evolve, and find new purpose in the work.
