With Artist Tim Silver's Works, Meaning Lies in the Eye of the Beholder

Working in sculpture, photography and installation, this Sydney-based artist explores time and intimacy.

In the late 1990s, Nipaluna/Hobart-born Tim Silver was running an artists collective in Sydney’s Surry Hills and grappling with “being out in the real world” after finishing a visual arts degree. Then he met the late sculptor Stephen Birch. “Stephen took me under his wing and taught me casting skills,” says Silver. “Primarily, that’s still how I work.”

In his earlier days, Silver experimented with ephemeral materials: a Tiger Moth aeroplane made from fairy floss (1997); action figures created using Violet Crumble bars (2001); and Rory (2009), a mannequin of a boy in watercolour pigment that water dripped onto throughout the show’s run, causing its eventual collapse. The spectacle was disturbing – for adults, that is. Silver recalls a child telling his father, “‘It’s not real, Daddy.’ The child could see it for what it was, the process.”

On working with glass, concrete, bronze, bread, copper, ash, soap, wax and gypsum, the artist says that “it’s not about becoming a master of one thing. I’m more interested in play and experimentation”. While his practice may be playful, his work often resonates more profoundly. The two figures lying side-by-side in The moment before I remember (2019), for example, are cast from ash, their parched and cracked bodies based on bedfellows found in the ruins of Pompeii. “I’m aware my work is perhaps not easy to put above a couch,” says Silver.

But there’s also immense tenderness in the imperfection, the incompleteness, of his sculptures. The pair of bronze figures in Can I, just wait here with you (2023; pictured above) embrace so tightly their bodies fuse together. And while materials such as bronze symbolise permanence, Silver’s interest in themes of time and impermanence remains. “Artists often exist in precarious spaces so to represent instability is important for me.”

His exhibition, Take Me Home, at the Sullivan+Strumpf gallery in Sydney (5 to 28 June), will present sculptural fragments of bodies as they connect in moments of intimacy or isolation. “I don’t like to dictate the meaning; people should read it through their own lens.”

Exhibited at: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Basel Hong Kong; Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney; Gillman Barracks, Singapore

What the critics say: “Tim Silver’s work shoots straight from the hip, investigating the spaces between love, fragility, decay and death.” – Courtney Kidd, Art Collector magazine, October-December 2019

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