Artist Tessa Hulls is currently living in Antarctica and working as a cook at the McMurdo Research Station, but she only knows how to feel at home while in motion. 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. Tessa recently completed a solo 5,000 mile bike ride across the United States, and she plans to wander and paint until she has a more definitive answer to the question of how to live as a nomad with roots. When not painting and living on ice shelves, she enjoys building community, cooking for ridiculously large groups of people, taking on more projects than she really has time for, meeting fellow saboteurs and collaborators, and writing for Redefine Magazine.

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):
AJ Fosik
Gala Bent
Mandy Greer
Justin Kane Elder
Stacey Rozich
Jeremy Mangan