Tamarin joined Loughborough as a Doctoral Prize Research Fellow in 2019, having completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2018 where she was a Clarendon Scholar at the Ruskin School of Art. She gained an MFA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths with an AHRC Research Preparation Masters Scheme award (2010), holds a BFA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2007), and a BA Hons in Italian and Linguistics from the University of Oxford (2004).
Tamarin’s research interests convene around the intersection of medical humanities, bereavement studies and creativity, including a focus on drawing and life-writing. From 2020-2021 Tamarin convened the Lives in Medicine research network at the University of Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes and in consultation with the Royal Society of Medicine. From 2023-25 she is a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and since 2019 she has been Visiting Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bath Centre for Death and Society, and part of the CDAS Writing initiative, exploring modes of scholarly, therapeutic and autobiographical writing in death studies. She has most recently been PI on “The Stories we Live By”, a Loughborough research project in collaboration with Held in Our Hearts baby loss charity, bringing therapeutic writing resources to bereaved parents, including distribution to NHS hospitals. In 2021 she won the Lancet Wakley Essay Prize with her essay "Something Good Enough", identifying impacts of research-based interventions in neonatal care.
Prior to her time at Loughborough Tamarin established parallel practices of artwork and writing. Her artwork has been shown widely in the UK and abroad including at Tate Britain, ICA Philadelphia and MOCCA Toronto, and she has undertaken artist residencies internationally, including with Art on the Underground London, Modern Art Oxford, Artex Abruzzo Italy, Atelierhaus Salzamt Austria and ICA Philadelphia USA. Recent UK projects include a twelve-month art writing residency at Spike Island Bristol, researching movement in drawing through 3D printing and sign language poetry with the support of Arts Council England (2016), and a two-year residency in London as part of Hubbub, an interdisciplinary collective of researchers awarded the inaugural interdisciplinary residency at The Hub at Wellcome Collection (2014-16). Tamarin’s short prose fiction and poetry has been broadcast on the BBC World Service and widely anthologized including by Bloodaxe, Art on the Underground, E.R.O.S journal and Wysing Arts Centre.
Research area:
Medical Humanities, Life-Writing, Fine Art.
Tamarin’s primary area of research is drawing, with special interest in figure-ground interaction and its variation at the site of the page and in relation to the written word. Her current focus is on the ground shared by drawing, paper conservation, bereavement and loss, and how the affective demands placed upon figurative drawing put pressure on its promises of tactility, flatness and stability.