About Tyga Helme

Born in 1990, Tyga lives and works in the UK. Tyga is a painter and printmaker with drawing lying at the heart of her practice. She uses the directness and urgency of drawing from life as a springboard for all her work, finding her subjects in nature’s edge-lands; where trees and mountains meet the sky, where sea meets rock or in tangled undergrowth. In working from life she celebrates the spontaneity of the moment whilst also building on memory and feeling by returning to places over and over again.

Trained at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal Drawing School in London, where she won the Machin Foundation Prize, Tyga uses nature as a metaphor for feelings of being overwhelmed. She couples minute observation of the teeming forest floor – where the emerald green of a bramble leaf sits in stark juxtaposition to an array of cold blue silver leaves – with the flux and movement of unceasing growth. She switches from the micro to macro and a particularly favourite subject is a clump of Douglas firs near where she lives which she views from underneath, highlighting their dark and jagged canopy against the azure sky.

‘The untidy areas are the exciting bits,’ says Tyga who lives on the Wiltshire Downs where she seeks out the uncultivated corners of fields or patches of woodland floor to paint. ‘Things really do spring up in one day and everything constantly shifts around,’ she says. ‘Grasses and brambles make way for animals; a shoot is there one day and gone the next because an animal has eaten it. A mushroom suddenly appears from nowhere. Everything is in a relationship with everything else.’

A rising star in the new British Landscape movement her works embodies an awakening to the importance of the ground beneath our feet.

Although Tyga lives and works in the UK she won an Erasmus scholarship to study at the L’Ecole Nationale Superieue des Arts Decoratifs in Strasbourg and for more than a year taught at the International Institute for Arts, Modinagar in India.

Her work is held in held in a number of important collections including the Royal Collection.Tyga Helme and MESSUMS.ORG representation HERE

Residency notes

During her inaugural week in residence at The Corridor Project, Tyga engaged in a dynamic period of research and development alongside an exceptional cohort of early career artists: Emily Ebbs, Clementine Belle, Bronte Leighton-Dore, and Lauren O’Connor The overlapping residency stimulated an enriching exchange of practice, cultural dialogue, and peer-to-peer connection across local and international contemporary arts contexts.

Art critic Peter Haynes conducted an in-depth interview with Tyga during the residency, resulting in a critical essay titled The Poetics of Distance (see below). Concurrently, artist Sammy Hawker captured Tyga’s evolving practice through video and photographic documentation (see below).

Situated on Wiradjuri Country amidst the granite-strewn escarpments of Central West New South Wales, Tyga undertook the development of a new body of work that emerged from site-responsive observation. Her time in residence catalysed a series of intuitive gouache studies—works that now form the foundation of her studio investigations in preparation for a forthcoming solo presentation at Messums West in 2026.

Tyga’s painterly response to the perceptual shifts between northern and southern hemisphere atmospheres—manifested through transitions in light, sonic texture, and chromatic scale—reveals an extraordinary sensitivity to place. Her capacity to navigate and embody these transformations with clarity and immediacy speaks to a practice both attuned and agile.

Essay

Tyga Helme - The Poetics of Distance by Art Critic and Curator - Peter Haynes HERE

Testimonial

“The Corridor Project gave me such an incredible sense of peace and calm from which to work from. The boundaries became porous between my living and working world and as a result I felt closer to my practice than I have for a long time. Being embedded in the landscape with a structureless day gave me space and time to connect to the new and unfamiliar landscape around me and allowed me to draw from it, without agenda or expectation. The studio was inspiring in scale and I loved how it felt connected to the outside world with its big doors and windows. Being able to work inside and outside so easily really helped develop working from observation outside but also from memory back in the studio. You can really feel the love and respect that The Corridor Project has for the natural environment and this makes it a very special place to work” - Tyga Helme 2024

Partners

The Corridor Project [TCP] and MESSUMS Creative [UK] partnered in early 2024 to develop an international artist-in-residency exchange program focused on creative expression, peer-to-peer exchange, and environmentalism. Artists involved include Tyga Helme, Jelly Green and Sammy Hawker.