Tamara Caris, the artist behind Topirets Artworks, was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1991. Coming from a family of European decent (Dutch and Ukrainian), exploring different countries and their cultures was always of great interest to Tamara. This lead Tamara on many travels and to take on various employment opportunities in Europe and eventually pursuing post-graduate studies in Europe
as well.
After completing her Master’s Degree in Strategic Management in the Netherlands, Tamara returned to Canada and continued her career in the
aerospace and defense industry. Working in such a structured industry and environment, Tamara uses her art as a way to explore and express the creative aspects of her personality.
Growing up, Tamara was constantly surrounded by European influences, especially the Ukrainian culture in its many forms. Having gone to Ukrainian school she was exposed to the Ukrainian arts and Ukraine’s well-known artists. Armed with this knowledge and keen interest, Tamara explored and dabbled in many different art forms prominent in European culture. She first learned to write pysanky (Ukrainian Easter Eggs) at a very young age, and upholding the tradition, she writes pysanky each Easter.
In 2017, Tamara hosted a fundraiser in which she sold over four hundred dollars’ worth of her handcrafted pysanky, donating all the proceeds to the Help Us Help the Children charity. As Tamara’s pysanky gained attention and admiration, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress bought and gifted two of her pysanky to Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, as pictured to the left.
During the same time frame of writing pysanky, Tamara began experimenting with different art forms such as pyrography and relief carving. The combination of these three art forms led Tamara to her current creative passion, linocuts. Although Tamara is a self-taught linocut artist, she brings to the table her techniques acquired through relief carving and continuously looks and researches ways to advance her skillset and master the art of linocuts.
Tamara’s prints are greatly influenced by her ancestry and upbringing. They often depict Ukrainian elements with a contemporary twist, as can be seen in her “Deconstructed Borsch” or “Schastya” prints (elephant tusks filled with pysanka designs). While only having been printing for a few short years, Tamara’s prints have already been sold to customers across Canada and the United States.