Tabitha’s work is rooted in the human body — its intimacy, its vulnerability, its stories. Drawing on her experience as an HIV nurse, palliative care nurse, soul midwife, and mother, she returns to the same territories: attitudes towards women, motherhood, death, dying and grief. These are not distant themes; they are drawn from the texture of her own life and from the lives of people she has sat beside when at their most vulnerable.
She works expressively and intuitively — painting and drawing as a way of figuring something out, repeating images, following gut instinct, letting meaning surface through the making. This series focuses on grief and mortality; the paintings are acts of witness, drawn from memory of people she encountered as a community palliative care nurse, each one a fragment of a life held still.
The first depicts a bricklayer, sitting with his wife and dog, talking about the houses he helped build as a young man. The second is a man dying alone in a near-empty flat; estranged from his family, his daily ritual of feeding the fox who came to his window one of his few connections. The third is of a woman in the final stage of brain cancer, cared for by a daughter who had already fought to bring her to safety from domestic violence. Each work draws attention to the life and story behind its subject — a tender moment captured.
The sculptures extend this enquiry into the body — clay forms shaped intuitively. They were started during the pandemic, fulfilling the need to touch and mould when touch was restricted. The figure is caught in that same tension: contained, exploding, lounging.
Instagram: @tabitharpowles