Statement and Biography
Tina Culverhouse (b. 1969, South London, England) is an artist based in London and France, currently studying MA Sculpture at the Royal College of Art London. Her site specific, performative sculptures and installations are made with materials that deteriorate and whose shape shifts over time.
In an ever developing practice, her work is evolving through an understanding that the pinch point is about display and collapse. As her world collapsed around her, the practice evolves as both an internal need to let and an external need to display as sense of grounding and of structure, often brutally fake and sometimes stronger than expected.
Rather than having a feeling of being rooted, Culverhouse says the work “gives a sense of release of duty to portray stability and allows the repetitive behaviours that allow the fragility a way through”. Her materials have returned to what can be carried and manipulated, not through choice but the lack of strength in her body, a result of live saving surgery. The Carrier, the Bearer, the Empath are all borne identities Culverhouse feels are not so easy to endure.
The materiality of the works persist from childhood, a sense of play, decommissioned before development really had a chance to flourish. Construction straws, detail paper, graphite, type, Quink inks and cartridge paper are used to reveal the inside to the outside. Culverhouse occasions to use more permanent materials which allow the ontogenic nature of her process to remain, bronze, glass, neon and print onto various surfaces, allows the thought to be generated, grown and formed and be part of one indivisible world of becoming.(Ingold, T, 2021)
Career Highlights
Awards
New Platform Art Award 2025
Digswell Arts Trust Fellowship Award 2023/25
Solo shows
The Stone Space, Leytonstone, London December 2024 to January 2025
Masters Interim Show, Upper Case Gallery, UH Creative School, July 2021
Selected Group Shows
Old Parcels Office, Scarborough, 2025; Hypha Sugar House Lane, 2025; APT Gallery, October 2024; Tremenheere Sculpture Park, August 2024; One Paved Court Gallery, November 2023; Thames-side Studios & Gallery, July 2024, July 2023, April 2023; Frieze Fringe, Koppel-X, October 2022; Thames-side Studios and Gallery, July 2022, April 2022; Masters Fine Art Show, Arts + Design Gallery, UH Creative School, September 2021
Selected Residencies
Mass Sculpture Studio in 2023 and 2022, Thames-side Studios, London
Project 15 Guest Artist, September 2019, Letchworth Garden City
Public Art Commissions
Stevenage Museum Underpass Posters for Gordon Craig Theatre 2020, ACE funded
Stevenage Museum “Suffrage Stories” Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, 2019, ACE funded
Education Highlights
RCA Sculpture MA, Royal College of Art, 25/25
Turps Mass Sculpture School, London, Studio based, September 2021/2024
City & Guilds, London, Summer School, 2024
Traditional Bronze Workshop with Kabir Hussain, 2023 & 2024
Professional Metal Working Courses at London Sculpture Workshop 2021 to 2024
Pewter Casting with Robert Worley at Morley College, London, 2022
Master of Fine Arts (Distinction) from UH Creative School September 2021
Metal Smithing & Jewellery Year, 1994-5 City Lit, Fleet Street, London
Bachelor of Arts, (Hons) in Fine Art and Art History (Highly Commended) awarded by Middlesex Polytechnic in 1991
Links to organisations I am involved with;
Tina Culverhouse 