Tamar Payne uses sampling and layering of her photography,  juxtaposing the repeated imagery of contemporary culture with the single moment of a painting, placing a female presence at ease with itself (neither passive or assertive) within the contemporary sublime. 

Decorative elements meet a foreboding sense that all may not be well in Tamar Payne’s neo-romantic works where the sublime, once eternal but now fragile, suggest a barely perceived post-human world. Tamar Payne plays with formal aspects of image making,  flatness, recessional space, materiality and surface. 

The artist's recent work concerns Alpine and glacial landscapes at a time of climate change. Tamar Payne presents these places, long associated with male western domination and privilege, as places in which female characters from the 19th century western literary canon, seek freedom and transcendence. Payne uses these iconic characters in her titles as cyphers through which to explore her themes. The artist has recently brought the figure back into their landscapes, as active self portraits of forms taking up negative space, subverting the genre of the nude as an objectified and claimed subject of the male gaze. 

Tamar is currently on the MA Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art (24/25). In the summer of 2026 she is taking part in an artist and scientific residency to the Arctic Circle.