Tamiko O’Brien is one half of collaborative duo Dunhill and O’Brien. Their art practice is guided by a preoccupation with materiality, process, and the troubling logistics of sculpture. A longstanding quest to bypass their individual taste has seen them working with apparatus, performative actions and, on some occasions, with groups of participants.
Projects include solo shows for the British Ceramic Biennial; Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, Holland; White Conduit Projects, and PostRoom, London, with residencies at Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, and the European Ceramic Work Centre, Holland. They have featured in group exhibitions at Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; The Estorick Collection; Danielle Arnaud Gallery; Das Weisse Haus, Vienna, and the Setouchi Triennale, Japan.
They have received support from the Arts Council England; the Art & Humanities Research Council; the Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Their research has involved interviewing dentists, boulderers, bakers and others who employ tactile knowledge; studying thirty-three Fuji like mounds in Tokyo; advertising as artists who dig holes for free, and visiting ‘celebrity’ boulders in the UK.
Tamiko worked as a tutor, course leader, head of school, associate dean and professor at a number of universities before taking up the post of principal at City & Guilds of London Art School, a role that she held until 2022. Tamiko’s involvement in pedagogic projects through her work as founding chair of the Fine Art European Forum, and her engagement in ELIA working groups, led to a range of curriculum developments and international exchanges, residencies and interdisciplinary projects.
Dunhill and O’Brien’s Fine Art residency at the British School at Rome in 2003 continues to influence and motivate their practice. During the UK national lock down in 2020 they filmed EIS, a re-imagined re-enactment of a work made at the BSR seventeen years earlier.
