For the 26-year-old artist Tanoa Sasraku, coming of age in Plymouth had its challenges. As a biracial, gay teenager, few people looked like her, and her desire for romantic love went unanswered. Instead, she found kinship not with a person, but a wilderness. “I constantly fantasised that, if I just got out of Plymouth, I would find this intangible thing,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what it would be, but accessing rural landscapes helped me understand what it might feel like.”
At 13, Sasraku joined the RAF Air Cadets and discovered the moors, “an unpredictable place”, where she witnessed animals being born or drowned in mires, where fog falls suddenly and the horizon might erupt in flames. This deeply personal engagement with rural Britain – its ancient sites, buried histories and lore – fuels an innovative art practice that is fast garnering accolades. Last year she won the Arts Foundation Futures award and this month at Bristol’s Spike Island, she opens her first big solo exhibition, Terratypes.
