Profile
Tanya Krzywinska
2022
07725 741717
Over the past 30 years I’ve been living a dual life. Working at Falmouth as an advocate of new technologies for the arts, while at the same time developing a personal art practice. My art brings together landscape and figurative, often inspired by folk horror and filtered through surrealism. This theme is grounded in my academic work on gender, animism as other, and the powers of folk horror within film, popular culture, and videogames.
In so doing, I seek to look awry at the commonplace and the normative, seeking a visual language of subtle unsettling. With an eye toward an understanding that there is an animate world beyond the human, the ‘big idea’ of most of the work is an intention to critique the notion of human mastery over nature, not only as a means of countering what has been called Anthropocene culture but also to gently undermine any secure sense that the world is in our service. House-haunting is a speciality.
My practice is informed by a variety of sources, theoretical, critical and practice-based. Philosophers Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva bring fecund ideas on the constitutional role of the other/Other in the psyche, providing the basis for pivotal concepts in my work, ie animism, ambiguity, and the uncanny. In a painting context, I inevitably return to Andrew Wyeth’s landscapes as a form of folk horror, as well as Kiki Smith’s engagement with folk tale and embodiment. Realism and imagination, design and concept, digital and material, each held in tension.
My work has three significant ‘mothers’, each providing support and sustenance: Leonora Carrington, Dorothy Tanning, and Ithell Colquhoun, on whose work I have written about in the book Gothic Kernow. Lastly, my inclusion of augmented reality and digital modelling in my art practice has been influenced by Lev Manovich. My sustained interest in animism motivates the use of AR and animation within my art practice. In this, Colquhoun’s expressed interest in animism is also my own.
You can find some recent animation on my Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@tanyakrzywinska1233
University of North London, PhD (Film/Visual Culture/Embodiment/sexuality and the politics of the gaze) 1994
• Central St Martin’s, MA Fine Art (Digital) Distinction 2023
• Falmouth University, MA authorial illustration (Distinction) 2014
• University of North London, MA Film 1991
• Reading University, BA(hons) Modern European Literature 1987
• Newlyn School of Art Professional Practice, Studio Practice. 2014-2019
• Professional: AHRC College.
- ‘Spline’ Group Show The Crypt St Ives 16th-22nd Aug 2025
- ‘Shrift’ Group Show Morvah Schoolhouse Gallery June 2025
- ‘Sidelong’ Group Show Castle Heritage Centre, Bude 7th-27th Feb 2025
- ‘Remains’ Group Show The Crypt St Ives 11th-16th Nov 2023
- ‘Sticks & Bones’ Group Show at The Crypt, St Ives. November 2022.
- ‘Breath & Earth’ Morvah Schoolhouse Gallery. (With Jill Eisele, Michael Harris, Sue Leake)
- ‘Field’ 1st-3rd April 2022. The Ninth Life Pub Gallery, London.
- ‘InSight’. 16-22 April 2022.Borlase Smart Room, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives. Group show
- ‘This is Not a Party! March 4-6th 2022 Trinity Bouys Wharf. Central St Martin’s postgraduate interim group show
- ‘Strange Folk’ July 2020 The Photographers Gallery, Falmouth University as part of the Folk Horror international conference.
- Dower House, popup, Lostwithiel, Easter 2017 & Spring 2018.
I have also shown work in group shows at: Tremenheere Gallery, Newlyn Art Gallery, The Crypt, The Poly Falmouth, The Wellington Boscastle (Halloween period event), PZ Gallery. And had work accepted for various Opens including Cornwall Museum, St Ives Society, and the Penwith.
I have participated in Cornwall Open Studios & Christmas Krowji for the past 8 years (barring lockdown years). I have curated and organised a number of the exhibitions above, as well others, including game art student shows and research-based exhibitions.
HEVGA Honorary Lifetime Fellow (2019);
DIGRA Honorary Lifetime Fellow (2018)
MBE
SELECTED BOOKS/PAPERS (FULL LIST ON REQUEST)
• Gothic Kernow: Cornwall as Strange Fiction (co-authored with Ruth Heholt). Anthem Press. 2021. [monograph]
‘Dangerous Agencies: Norns, Games and Aesthetics of Emergence’ in Shaw & Fletcher Watson (eds) The Art of Being Dangerous: Exploring Women and Danger through Creative Expression. Leuven University Press. 2021.
• Co-editor with Esther MacCallum-Stewart & Justin Parsler Ring Bearers: The Lord of the Rings Online as Intertextual Narrative. MUP. 2011.
• Co-editor with Barry Atkins, Videogame/Player/Text. MUP, 2007.
• Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Forms and Meanings of Videogames (co-authored with Geoff King), IB Tauris, 2006. [monograph]
• Science Fiction Cinema (with Geoff King). 2005. Wallflower/ColumbiaUP. [monograph]
• Sex and the Cinema. Wallflower/ColumbiaUP.[monograph]
• Co-editor with Geoff King, ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces. Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press. 2002.
• ‘Ludic Folk Horror’ in Keetley. D, and Heholt, R. (eds.) Folk Horror: New Global Pathways. Palgrave (2022)
• ‘Playing the Intercorporeal: Frankenstein’s Legacy for Games’ in Mulvey, Roberts et al, Global Frankenstein, Palgrave. 2018
• ‘Gothic Gaming: Monsters, Otherness & Dislocation’ in Jeffrey Weinstock (ed.)Cambridge Guide to American Gothic. Cambridge University Press. 2017.
• Krzywinska, T. Phillips, T. Parker, Al. Scott, M., ‘From Immersion’s Bleeding Edge to the Augmented Telegrapher: A Method for Creating Mixed Reality Games for Museum and Heritage Contexts’. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage Volume 13Issue 4December 2020 Article No.: 32pp 1–20https://doi.org/10.1145/3414832
• Scott, Michael James and Parker, Alcwyn and Powley, Edward and Saunders,Rob and Lee, Jenny and Herring, Phoebe and Brown, Douglas and Krzywinska, Tanya (2018) Towards an Interaction Blueprint for Mixed Reality Experiences in GLAM Spaces: The Augmented Telegrapher at Porthcurno Museum. In: Proceedings of the 32nd BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference, 2-6July, 2018, Belfast, NI.
• Krzywinska, T. Phillips, T. Parker, Al. Scott, M., ‘From Immersion’s Bleeding Edge to the Augmented Telegrapher: A Method for Creating Mixed Reality Games for Museum and Heritage Contexts’. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage Volume 13Issue 4December 2020 Article No.: 32pp 1–20https://doi.org/10.1145/3414832
Work in Progress: gARdens AR app digital sculpture project for Tremenheere Sculpture Park. AHRC Funded. Delivery Spring 2023.
• Work in Progress ATTUNE project, with Oxford University et al. Games co-designed for young people who have experienced trauma. Funded by MRC.
• ‘Jan Tregeagle: A Cornish Odyssey’. App to accompany traversal around Kerdroya ‘Labyrinth’ AONB & NT project. (Dec 2021). Funded by Arts Council.
• Looe Museum, Cornwall. AR app based on the Monks of Looe Island (completed Feb 2021). Funded by Coastal Communities.
• Isles of Scilly Museum. AR-based island shipwreck walking tour. (March 2021). Funded by Coastal Communities.
• Bude Heritage Centre, Cornwall. VR experience navigating a sailboat into Bude harbour. 2019-2020. Coastal Communities.
• St Agnes Museum, Cornwall. VR recreation of St Agnes harbour. 2020. Implemented April 2021. Funded by Coastal Communities
• Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, ‘Augmented Telegrapher’ HoloLens experience of wartime Porthcurno. 2019. AHRC.
• Goonhilly Earth Station visitor centre. ‘Space on Earth’ VR app. 2018. Funded by Audiences of the Future.
• ‘Augmented Telegrapher’. AR physical app for HoloLens, Porthcurno Telegraph Museum. 2017-2019.
• Kafka’s Wound. ‘The Game of the Wound’ Collaboration with Will Self and London
