Tessa Hulls is a Seattle-based artist/writer/adventurer slowly decompressing from a year of travel that took her everywhere from Alaska to Alabama to Antarctica by means of bicycle, boat, and military transport plane. Tessa only knows how to feel at home while in motion, and her own sense of rootlessness provides one of the central themes of her highly personal and yet archetypically familiar paintings. Her work explores the ideas of wanderlust and home, exile and migration, escapism and sacrifice, and her paintings describe the intricate worlds to which memory, desire and strength retreat to explore the aching pull of contradictory longings. Tessa draws heavily on folk-imagery from around the world, piecing together paintings that recombine “stolen” elements of color, pattern, myth and allegory to create new fairy tales which are at once alarmingly strange and immediately recognizable. She is also in the middle of switching mediums and is working on a non-fiction graphic novel about Antarctica. When not painting and living on ice shelves, she enjoys building community, cooking for ridiculously large groups of people, traveling by bike, going for aimless walks, taking on more projects than she really has time for, drawing in the bear enclosure of the Woodland Park Zoo, meeting fellow saboteurs and collaborators, writing for The Project Room and Redefine Magazine, plotting world domination with the nefarious minds of Canoe Social Club, and running the kitchen of Sprout Seattle. She doesn't do well with down time.

Interviews and Press:
Squidface and the Meddler
The 100 Interviews Project
Artists Who Interview: A Roundtable Discussion
Artists and Scientists Are Secretly Super Similar: A Presentation for Research Club Brunch
Proxart
Artflakes
The Barking

The Flip Side (Artists Tessa Has Interviewed):
Joey Bates
AJ Fosik
Gala Bent
Mandy Greer
Justin Kane Elder
Stacey Rozich
Jeremy Mangan