Tyza has often used surfaces as a metaphor for representation. When I was sitting in the kitchen with them, chatting about rhizomes, there were two of their large bent board sculptures from their exhibition Assuming A Surface on display behind me. Some of the boards are similar dimensions to the ones they paint life-sized self-portraits on, and others are elongated, almost like an overextension of a portrait. They’ve got bracing on the back like those portraiture boards, too. But these boards are bent in different ways. One is bent backwards into an archway that can stand in the middle of the floor, and another is bent forwards from one corner, which means that when it is installed on the wall, it looks as though the corner is peeling off the wall. The front surface of the boards is primed as if ready to be painted on, but they’re left blank. I like that the boards, the very foundations on which representation is projected, manipulated, and called into question, become embodiments themselves. As part of a rhizomatic way of looking at self-portraiture, in these works Tyza conveys their own bodily expression and experience using minimalist strategies that draw attention to relationships between artworks, architecture, and audiences. The dyed fabric Opening series of works speaks to this strategy. They were dyed by being carefully laid into a bathtub, and for this reason they evidence some of the proportions of a human form. The colours radiating from central points on the fabric have a corporeal sensibility, as if the colour was an apparition of a body that had been laying in the bathtub or, when hung vertically, standing in the gallery. They are an indirect path to a body.