Hello, I’m Tansy Hargan, an artist, maker, and educator based in Sheffield, U.K.
Since I was very small, I’ve kept visual diaries, experimented with textiles, and been fascinated with nature. I have studied and practised architecture and landscape architecture (and continue to teach the latter at university). Critical observation, inventiveness, and respect for ecological processes define my approach to both design disciplines.
I’m a colour synesthete, which means that everything I encounter, consider, or undertake is spontaneously experienced as a colour. I need colour to make sense of things and function. It is an entirely instinctive thing, like breathing, that has been with me as long as I remember.
Not surprisingly, my art is dominated by colour, nature, or materiality. I love to travel, alone and in company, exploring urban and rural places with my sketchbook, and recording journeys and processes at and from different scales, speeds, mindsets, viewpoints and so on. Sometimes I make brisk marks, colour studies, and thumbnails to record, simplify, or interpret what I experience. Other times I am still and silent, working slowly in a meditative way, allowing my practice to influence how I feel. Repetition and annotation are often important in my work, both in helping me see and understand concepts and typologies, by externalising my thoughts and committing them to language, and as a way of sharing my internal dialogue further with viewers. In the same way, I see teaching and collaborating as part of my art practice, not just a supporting activity.
My mixed media palette, especially in textiles, is an allusion to the materials and mechanisms of landscape: it is layered and adapted, diverse and inventive. I deconstruct old garments to harvest high quality fabrics, which I combine with materials of utility and commercial by-products, such as tailors’ waste. Sometimes, my methods deliberately mimic geophysical activity, as I alter reclaimed fabric by staining, bleaching, scraping, scoring, and slashing. My work develops in stages, with layers added and taken away repeatedly, and traces of past iterations visible through and between subsequent veils and fibres.
I host online art courses on this website, and run in-person workshops. Both are bookable in my shop, where my range of sketching tools and handmade watercolour paints are available to buy (when in stock), along with a collection of my favourite studio tools and art supplies.