Tabatha Andrews is a sculptor and installation artist who works across diverse media including textiles, wood, bronze, glass, sound and light, film and performance. Her work explores the relationships between memory, materials and the observer. Creating experiences that question how we communicate through the senses, her works are immersive, tactile, and invite mental and physical interaction. Her projects are often socially engaged and collaborative, building relationships with a wide variety of diverse communities and contexts. Tabatha also works with arts in health and the sciences, exploring connections between craft, play, memory loss, sensory perception and language acquisition. She has worked with cathedrals, hospitals, composers, scientists, communities with diverse needs, singers and local craft groups.
During 2015 she ran an Arts Council funded project exploring sculpture and resonance with composer John Matthias and blind opera singer Victoria Oruwari (ROOMartspace London and KARST Plymouth). She was also a commissioned artist on the 'Bideford Black'project in North Devon with Flow Projects and Burton Museum, making work which explored the links between drawing, memory and geology. Her work responds to and transforms different sites and contexts, including forests, cathedrals,contemporary architecture and cyberspace. Tabatha was the 2015 winner of the 'First@108' Public Art Award to make two major new works on the theme of Memory for the Alzheimers and Dementia wards of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. The first, The Dispensary, won the Building Better Healthcare Award for Collaborative Projects in 2017. A short film by Liberty Smith about The Dispensary can be found here. Tabatha was shortlisted for the Mark Tanner SculptureAward 2018 and received a Kings College London Innovation funding award for Call and Response, a collaboration with the stem cell scientistAndrea Streit researching communication, memory and hearing loss. She showed in Spare Parts at Science Gallery London, an exhibition about prosthetics and body identity, and premiered Antiphon, a live vocal sound work about listening, with the composer Charlotte Harding in 2019. In 2019 she was awarded the Plymouth Art Weekender Community Engagement Commission Make It Up with Tim Bolton, exploring the history of pattern making in Plymouth. In 2020 she was included in 50 Women Sculptors published by Aurora Metro. Recent shows includeTogether We Rise at Chichester Cathedral (2022) and Wander_Land at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens (2023). Tabatha lectures at Falmouth School of Art and West Dean College of Arts and Conservation - her next course is Resonant Frequencies.
Tabatha Andrews studied at Glasgow School of Art, Slade School of Art and the Skowhegan School of Art, Maine, USA. She was Artist in Residence at Gloucester Cathedral in 2002-3, and has shown widely, making work for R O O M Gallery and STATION in Bristol, the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trust, Plymouth Art Centre, the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Natural World in Haldon Forest, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, and the Monument to the Fire of London. Tabatha has lectured widely including Byam Shaw School of Art, University of Gloucestershire, Loughborough University, Leeds Beckett University, Arts University Plymouth, Plymouth University, the Slade School of Art, Chichester University and Dartmoor Arts Project . Contact