Artists are supposed to make people look at things in a new way and the capacity to do this with AR is enormous. Art occupying spaces other than a gallery wall creates the possibility of engaging new audiences.

KRE: Why do you think this was particularly important for the Passmore Edwards Centenary Festival?

TK: Cornwall has always been a place of innovation and technology, from leading developments arising out of the mining industry to the St Ives Modernists. Passmore Edwards is a part of this history of innovation. He encouraged education and inclusivity, building physical structures and infrastructure to facilitate community outreach. We can learn from Passmore Edwards’ philanthropy, that it’s important to give back to the social dimension of our culture. I’m interested in getting people involved with digital art who think there is a barrier to entry. Increasingly, this barrier is becoming more malleable.

One of my other ongoing projects is developing an app for children who have suffered trauma, which will use art practice techniques within it. The app will be a game which will help children articulate their own trauma. Digital technology can provide a private and absorbing space for children with traumatic experiences to access and have ownership of.

KRE: What is the piece you have created for the NSA Engage show?

Tanya takes me over to the dollhouse. On closer inspection, what looks like heavily patterned wallpaper covering the minute walls, is hundreds of detailed drawings. These drawings are highly illustrative, inky black and intriguing. Creatures blossom out of them: crows, red-eyed monsters, and shifting black masses. Tanya explains that she becomes restless when sat still for long periods of time and needs something to do with her hands, so, whilst in meetings, she doodles on bits of paper.

This wallpaper is the result of layering these collected scraps on top of each other.

Tanya takes her phone, hovering it over each room. Through the screen a pulsing mass of coloured particles pulse and swells. She moves to the hall and reveals a crow flying directly towards the viewer. In the next room, ragged red words ‘the charms wound up’ materialise before dissolving. Downstairs, the word ‘bat’ is repeated hundreds of times, forming itself into leaves of a breathing auburn tree.

TK: Augmented reality is three-dimensional, allowing you to move through space and create a kind of environmental storytelling. The way AR works is that it reads images like QR codes, pulling up the animation and layering it on the space. I take photographs of each room, inputting these into the AR application, then link them to the animations I have created. When your phone hovers over the room in the correct way, the animation appears. 

KRE: Can you expand on what inspired the animations?

TA: They are kind of hauntings. A lot of what I do references Folk Horror; many of the core texts, ‘The Wicker Man,’ ‘Ritual,’ ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw,’ are set in Cornwall. These narratives surround the fear of nature and the rural. With my work, I borrow from the vocabulary of these narratives. I don’t seek to tell a narrative story, rather the words and images I use come together in a kind of visual poetry. I’m interested in the landscape as a living, pulsing, needing thing and blurring the lines between the domestic and the natural. I’m fascinated by the texture of difference between the inside and the outside. When we cross the boundary of the domestic, we are crossing both emotional and psychological borders. I’m drawn to dwellings where this boundary is being dissolved, where humanity’s mark is being overtaken by natures incredible energy. The domestic turned wild is a breach of the categorisation.