Tobah is an art historian specializing in twentieth-century Britain. Her research addresses the intersection of art, industry, and environment, and includes inquiries into the visual history of extraction, the industrial provenance of artistic materials, images of pollution, and the resonance between artistic and industrial labor.
Tobah’s dissertation, “Mineral Landscapes: British Art and Extraction, 1937-1975,” argues that resource extraction, and its attendant issues of pollution, materiality, and labor, provided a rich subject matter for post-war British artists, who were interested in integrating the nation’s changing landscapes and workplaces into an increasingly abstract practice. She demonstrates that the multi-media objects that resulted from these encounters insisted on the pictorial relevance of labor, class, and environmental degradation, critical contemporary issues that continue to resist easy representation.
