Tyreis Holder

Tyreis Holder is an Artist, Poet, community arts practitioner and Visual Storyteller 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 practise centres around explorations of self and identity, generational/ancestral trauma and the relationship with the mind, particularly within regards to navigating colonial spaces. 

Her primary grounds for exploration explores how textiles pose as poetic language, functioning as a healing device- specifically in regards 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, class, sexuality and culture. Poetry translates into garments/textiles, installations pose as poetry pages.

*She interchanges the word disability with diffability and disabled with diffabled. The word disabled implies lack, ‘dis’ deriving from latin meaning ‘not’. The constant reminder of lack can have a negative psychological impact. Words have weight. However, through difference, you can find power. She has coined the terms diffabiliity and diffabled – deriving from differ-bility and differ-abled, but has chosen a phonetic spelling approach drawing from the structure of patois.

UKNA Projects:

Robert Walters Group UK New Artist of the Year Award 2022