Painting + Drawing
I am drawn to the tension between control and surrender—how images, materials, and memory are shaped as much by what is present as by what is absent. My hybrid practice, spanning painting, photography, and video, explores the themes of time, perception, and embodiment. These concerns are rooted in early experiences of displacement and transition: moving from upstate New York to rural Virginia during a formative period, surrounded by vast, untamed landscapes while navigating familial absence and change. That sense of solitude and wonder continues to echo through my work today.
Process is both a methodology and a metaphor. In my paintings, I often invite environmental forces—sun, rain, snow, chemical reactions—to leave their imprint on the surface, allowing time and weather to co-author the image. In lens-based works, I use cyanotype, indigo dyeing, and other light-sensitive processes to capture ephemeral traces—marks that hold memory without a fixed subject. These techniques foreground transformation and transmission, turning each piece into a kind of dispatch: a message shaped by both the hand and the environment, both intention and chance.
Rooted in personal history but attuned to broader temporal and material ecologies, my work seeks to hold space for what has been lost, remembered, or reshaped. Influenced by art history, speculative fiction, and emerging technologies, I aim to create quiet openings—spaces where past and future, presence and absence, can coexist.
For inquiry on available works, please email: joy.tirade@gmail.com
