Tiffany Wellington

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1996 and raised in London, Tiffany Wellington works across sculpture, sound, moving image and performance. Their practice draws on Jamaican sound system culture, oral histories and the figure of Anansi, the West African trickster whose stories circulate through the Caribbean diaspora.

Wellington’s interest in the trickster extends into how they construct narratives, playing with the distance between what something appears to be and what it is. Yet what happens when the truth of an encounter resides not in what can be seen, but in what one is willing to believe?

Their own experience of moving between countries informs this attention to how identity is read and how these readings can contradict one another. Wellington increasingly approaches sound as a sculptural element that occupies a room and shapes how people move through it. For Duppy Water (2023), Wellington visited and recorded a pond in Jamaica where visitors bathe in water that can be set alight, drawn by accounts of its healing properties. The artist was interested in how these promises were presented to tourists, and in the local economy sustained by their willingness to believe. Translated into an installation of pallets, water, mist, light, incense and sound, the encounter became an atmosphere that visitors could enter and spend time in. The work brings Wellington’s interest in the trickster into contact with the commercial narratives through which a place is made desirable, asking how belief is produced and who benefits from its circulation.

Wellington compares their approach to conducting, drawing on the way a DJ shapes an atmosphere while responding to the people within it. Time spent in an exhibition space informs the arrangement of sound and sculpture, while improvised performances allow glitches and unexpected changes to become part of the work. Édouard Glissant’s’ right to opacity’ has been an important reference, informing Wellington’s willingness to leave aspects of a narrative as a half-truth. Their installations guide attention without fixing what an audience must understand, allowing interpretations to emerge that can, in turn, change the artist’s own relationship to what they have made.

Wellington completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2022, following a BA in Fine Art at Falmouth University in 2019. Solo and duo exhibitions include A Public Safety Concern with Raheel Khan at The Bomb Factory in collaboration with Lisson Gallery, London (2024); Grey Area at Studio Chapple, Love Is a State of Mind with Maria Joranko at San Mei Gallery, and Duppy Water at Public Gallery, London (all 2023). Selected group exhibitions include Camera Obscura at Public Gallery and Hard Evidences at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London (both 2025). They received the Lisson Gallery Scholarship in 2022.