Tam Hare graduated from Edinburgh Napier University last year with a BA (Honors) in Photography and Film and is currently studying for an MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster, Harrow in London. He has exhibited at the Patriot Hall Gallery, Edinburgh; Gallery West in Harrow; and has taken part in the Edinburgh International Festival.
Tam primarily uses photography as his media of choice but also utilises printmaking, painting, video and installation in much of his practice and has been working for over five years on a variety of subjects, with his main point of reference focusing on the absurd and the surreal. His influence comes from a variety of different sources such as critical theory, political discourse, popular music, literature, poetry, film and many visual artist’s works and writings. Tam is now part of a working partnership named Folie À Deux. who use photography and mixed media in their work; combining the photographic image with painting, collage and sculpture. They exhibited their first project entitled Fear and Reason, at the Camden Eye and recently unveiled their new piece, Reducito ad Absurdum at the Migrate exhibition as part of the in Edinburgh International festival.
“My current work, such as I Dream of Home and Habit, has a conceptual approach and looks into modern notions of the Absurd. I use staged images of the figure against the landscape; both in urban and rural environments. The aim is to convey my own introspective, obscure, visual narrative. Inspiration comes through many artists, writers, poets and theorists - Andrei Tarkovsky; Douglas Gordon; Samuel Beckett; and Marcel Duchamp, to name a few. Using a combination of image and text I try to add another layer of interpretive meaning to my work and this investigation into contemporary Absurdism is ongoing. I am interested in political and critical discourse, and have used the writings of Roland Barthes and new Marxist thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek and Noam Chomsky as a direct reference in my work. Other writers that have imbued my work are Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Becket. In I Dream of Home I have reworked Waiting For Godot and Eliot’s The Wasteland to add another layer of meaning. I have done this more as a way of posing questions rather than of making any definitive statements about modern capitalist existence. In this I have always strived for an empowerment of the viewer.”
