Talora Welsh

Talora Welsh is a designer and artist specialising in metalwork. Born in England, Talora studied Design Crafts at De Montfort University, Leicester. Through her undergraduate course, Talora found a passion for creating narratives through metal, leading her to study Jewellery and Metalwork at the Royal College of Arts.

The work that Talora produces focuses on her autobiographical experience of the human condition, more specifically mental health and emotional growth. Through playing with the boundaries of perception, Talora challenges the importance of functionality and attractiveness, aiming to create work that invites her audience to interact and understand. What attributes are important in the things we cherish? How can the objects we care for reflect ourselves? 

With a curiosity for objects Talora aims to open up communication with her audience in the hope of creating a kinder world.

Her work has been exhibited across England as well as being displayed through public commissions in both England and Canada.

Through living life, objects cannot be avoided. Every day humans encounter countless objects from a ring passed down through generations in a family, to the wrapper that their purchased lunch came in. Throughout societies people have created a hierarchy of things that are deemed more important based on their own personal criteria. As the world continues to develop into the digital, our connections with objects feel more important. The objects in Talora’s work breathe a new meaning to everyday items, highlighting their original importance and challenging their limits. 

The kitchen is an important place in every house, it is an important place for wellbeing and survival. The idea behind this project was to take that comfort and manipulate it in order to understand the artist's relationship with fear. 

To fear something is the instinctual reaction to a stimulus that evokes some form of danger. However, when a fear response is out of proportion to the circumstance, these are considered irrational fears. Irrational fears can become so common that they are labeled rational, such as a fear of the common house spider. A fear of fish, Ichthyophobia, remains irrational, unless the subject is a plankter.

This collection looks at what the world would look like if the objects that society uses every day, reflected the users emotional state. If the objects that are relied upon to live, started mirroring emotions that are deemed inconsequential. People would be unable to dismiss ‘messy’ feelings when the items in front of them failed to carry out their purpose.

Through this collection, Talora documented her reaction to preparing a series of meals that featured a whole fish. Talora’s methods were based around the principles of exposure therapy combined with art therapy. Through these documented subjections to the stimulus, she was able to increase prolonged exposure to sea-life, however, becoming increasingly more interested in the fear response itself.

Talora writes:

“There is no room for personalised words to express individual emotions in a greater language. Fear is the general terminology, but no two experiences are the same. Through art, however, we are able to express these feelings through objects. This collection is my way of breaking down how I experience fear. The audience is invited to use these objects to feel with me, or to use them to aid their own expression.”