Peeling back the layers

Tamara Dean is a photo-media artist known for her dreamlike images of people in nature. Bodies tumble, plunge and pose amid lush foliage and aquatic pools. Dean often captures these figures in groups, as though navigating a collective experience or rite of passage. For the artist, these scenes of beauty convey the connections between humans and the natural world, including their shared vulnerability.

Peeling back the layers is from the body of work High jinks in the Hydrangeas, which focused on Dean’s desire to be in nature during the first global COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020. Developed during this period of flux and isolation, the series explores ideas of restraint and escape and was described by Dean at the time as being her most personal to date. Peeling back the layers allegorically speaks to this tension between seclusion and collectivity, interiors and the outside world, as the two figures push and pull themselves against oversized tree trunks.