Tim Silver: Looking Back

Tim Silver contemplates the ways plague has shaped his practice and bushfire forged new works.

Large(ish) scale projects such as Untitled (object), that draw on the skills and expertise of many people from diverse locations, seems like an increasingly distant memory. Recently “feeling out” when Adam, Keith or Stephen, the film prop people I often work with on my life casting projects, might be available, I was met with the fresh realisation of what it means to be separated by borders – both local and international. The challenge for us still being not how we get together, but when.

Looking back at producing Untitled (object) for Parallel Collisions, Adelaide Biennial of Art in 2011, and recalling this collaborative effort, marked by a surprising ease and also willingness of these people to jump on board - that I was struck by a sense of loss. A loss to a particular style of work that became possible for me at this particular time. Also, that these professionals would want to help a small-time artist, with a limited budget, and indulgent, if not silly idea, was of great and continuing surprise to me. The reality is that as an artist, being not entirely sure on how things should be done, one often wants them done in ways unfamiliar and challenging to these professionals. It seems we are currently not only separated by borders but of these very collisions between people.

Sculpture is more often than not, tactile in nature. It involves getting up close and personal. The process of lifecasting even more so. Being unable to muster the courage to ask anyone else to model for me, I offered my own body up. Literally being smothered in a silicone rubber, multiple hands ensuring it layered evenly into every bodily crevice, and then wrapped in plaster bandages which heats to baking summer temperatures does not accommodate a social distancing compliance. The strangeness of feeling those hands so proximate yet so separated as the silicone sets. The simultaneous intimacy and distance of this all at once.

Untitled (object) consisted of this self life-cast, naked with the exception of a loosely fitting hoodie that was draped softly over the head whilst exposing the chest. The object was cast entirely of Timbermate Woodfiller Putty, a material which frozen in sculptural form on arrival into the world, gradually dried, slumped and cracked over the ongoing weeks. ‘Ruins in reverse,’ as Robert Smithson might say from his grave. 1

The forces of decay and preservation fought against each other to reach a new equilibrium in Untitled (object). Woodfiller putty is calcium-based and possesses some of the same qualities of plaster. The nature of the work is in some ways cyclical, in which it slowly and irrevocably, settled – and finished up much where it began – in a moment, frozen and preserved in time.

Tim Silver, ‘Untitled (Object) (Cedar Timbermate Woofiller)’, 2012 (detail), Installation at the 2012 Adelaide Biennial

Installation view (detail) Parallel Collisions: 12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2012 Curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor and Natasha Bullock

1. An idea from Robert Smithson’s 1967 essay A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, Ruins in Reverse, Originally published as “The Monuments of Passaic”, Artforum, December 1967, p. 52-57