Tamara Osso is a Johannesburg-based artist whose work explores a trail of connections between painting, dance and other forms of movement. Drawing deeply on her personal experience as a professional dancer and a mother to a child with a disability, she is interested in how different kinds of movement are available to different bodies in different contexts.

For Osso, physical movement is a form of embodied research, and in her painting practice she looks for ways to draw connections between the dynamism of the body and visual languages.

The proprioceptive act of painting, in which one always situates their body in relation to material, becomes a metaphor for how space is inhabited and experienced more broadly. As a woman negotiating different public and private spaces in Johannesburg, she is constantly aware of how safety and freedom are coded in the aesthetics of the city and the suburbs.

In recent work, Osso considers how the city’s domestic gardens function as spaces of refuge and thresholds between private and public worlds. Bridging these relationships is an exploration of her own psychological state. Both the subject matter of her paintings and her engagement with dance bring inner worlds to the surface.