Tracing Memory Through Oil and Archive: Tiyana Mitchell’s Intimate Portraits Across Place and Time
Rendered with the smooth, near-photographic realism of the Old Masters, emerging artist Tiyana Mitchell paints from the film of memory. In her first UK solo exhibition, Conversations Across Time, now on view at Larkin Durey, images emerge the way memories do—fragmented, elusive, suspended between presence and absence.
Mitchell draws her source material from her late grandfather’s photographic albums, which trace her family’s life across the Middle East and his travels in Europe. Many were carefully labelled; others, discovered after her grandmother’s passing, arrived without names or dates. These unlabelled photographs—mute but suggestive—became central to Mitchell’s practice. Rather than seek definitive answers, she treats them as open-ended prompts, painting what she describes as ‘a memory that isn’t entirely mine’.
The idea took root after a chance encounter in New York, when a stranger mentioned knowing her grandfather—a man Mitchell had barely known. That brief exchange sparked a deeper search. Online, she eventually found part of her family archive on the Arab Image Foundation website. When travel restrictions lifted, she returned to Jordan to sit with her grandmother and the albums, attempting to trace what had long remained unspoken.
Mitchell’s paintings are composed through a process of cropping and isolating. A folded sleeve, a shadowed glance, or the tension between two partially visible figures becomes the new centre of gravity. The effect is meditative and elusive: familiar yet unknowable.
Having studied at the Royal College of Art in London, Mitchell works in oil on linen, transforming ephemeral snapshots into immersive, slow-burning images. Where her grandfather sought clarity and order in assembling his albums, Mitchell embraces the ambiguity they leave behind.
Her work resists nostalgia. Some images lean towards the playful—like a cousin asleep, encircled by prankishly placed objects. Others include unnamed political figures, placed without context beside family portraits. Mitchell maintains this dissonance, collapsing the boundary between the personal and the historical.
‘Art without a story is just decoration’, producer Rick Rubin once said. Mitchell’s paintings bear this out. They are not decorative in the traditional sense. They are acts of narrative enquiry—attempts to recover, reframe and sometimes let go.
She describes her practice as a dialogue with her grandfather, one that spans time, geography and medium. His images were whole; Mitchell’s are fragmented. Yet together, they form a new visual language—one that reflects the instability of memory itself. As such, her scenes resemble film stills—framed on canvas, uncertain in meaning, yet impossible to look away from.
In Conversations Across Time, Mitchell does not attempt to reconstruct the past so much as she listens to it. Her canvases, rendered in oil on linen, echo the muted tones of aged prints. The stories they hold remain incomplete—and that is precisely the point.
We spoke to the artist during her exhibition at Larkin Durey in London, where she reflected on the origin of the project and the process of translating personal archives into painted images.
Please go to https://artplugged.co.uk/tiyana-mitchell-paints-film-of-memory for the full interview.
Text and interview by Len Gordon.
