Tyreis Holder is an artist, poet and visual storyteller from South London with heritage reigning from Jamaica / St Vincent. She works heavily in mediums pertaining to installation, textiles, performance, poetry, sculpture and sound.
Her practice centres around explorations of self and identity, the relationship with the mind, particularly with regards to navigating colonial spaces. Her primary grounds for exploration looks at 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, installations pose as poetry pages.
Her artwork has been exhibited at the South London Gallery and Deptford X, and as a poet she has performed at the South London Gallery, Welcome Collection and ICA.
*Tyreis Holder interchanges the word disability with diffability and disabled with diffable. 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. Tyreis 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.
