Tiyana Mitchell: Conversations Across Time
18th July, 2025 – 29th August, 2025
Larkin Durey
13 Masons Yard
London SW1Y 6BU
Drawing on family archives and a diasporic upbringing, Tiyana Mitchell’s debut UK solo show reflects on memory, identity, and the fragments that shape personal history.
At Larkin Durey, Tiyana Mitchell’s first solo exhibition in the UK presents a series of recent paintings shaped by migration, memory, and photographic archives. The work reflects a life lived across Cyprus, Jordan, and various parts of the United States, and centres on the artist’s ongoing engagement with her family’s past through the lens of historical photographs and personal discovery.

Album 1: Jericho 1963: 1, 2025
Oil on Linen
4 3/4 x 4 3/4 in
12 x 12 cm
The work is rooted in a chance encounter: Mitchell, who was six when her grandfather died, met a friend of his quite by accident. The meeting stirred a fascination with a man she hardly remembered. Her search led to the Arab Image Foundation website, where she discovered digitised photographs from her family’s archive. When COVID restrictions lifted in 2021, she returned to Jordan to begin her research in earnest.
In collaboration with her grandmother, Mitchell pored over family photo albums, piecing together a fragmented past. After her grandmother’s death, three more albums were unearthed — entirely unlabelled, offering few clues beyond a handful of visual echoes from earlier images. Their mystery proved compelling. These ambiguous photographs would become the primary source material for her new paintings.
Mitchell, an accomplished photographer herself, treats these archival images with reverence. She isolates details — a hand, a shadow, a glance — while remaining faithful to the spirit of her grandfather’s photographs. The result is a subtle, transgenerational collaboration: a dialogue between two sensibilities, decades apart.

Album 6 : Amman: 1960’s: 1, 2025
Oil on Linen
4 3/4 x 4 3/4 in
12 x 12 cm
The paintings linger in the space between presence and absence, memory and myth. They do not offer answers, nor do they attempt to reconstruct a fixed narrative. Instead, they dwell in uncertainty, asking what it means to see without fully knowing, to remember without possessing the whole story. Mitchell’s work is deeply personal but resists sentimentality. Her compositions evoke the grain and fragility of old photographs, yet remain distinctly painterly — fluid, searching, and alert to the complexities of representation.
Born in Scottsdale, Arizona, Mitchell now lives and works in London. She holds a Master’s degree in Painting from the Royal College of Art. This exhibition marks a significant moment in her practice: an exploration not just of family and heritage, but of the elusive nature of memory itself.
Tiyana Mitchell: Conversations Across Time opens on the 18th of July, 2025 until the 29th of August, 2025 at Larkin Durey
©2025 Tiyana Mitchell, Larkin Durey