Tim Silver is an artist concerned with transformation and the boundaries of permanence and the temporary. Silver works across a variety of media that includes melted crayons, watercolour pigment and even bubblegum. The artist painstakingly renders a sculpture in weak and impermanent material, bestowing the work a great fragility and aesthetic appeal. Silver then records his works in their varying degrees of decay. A visually compelling and conceptually rich piece is Rory. Silver cast a life size sculpture of a young boy in blue watercolour pigment that the artist had made himself using an old 1940s recipe. The mould was painstakingly built up by layers of 1mm at a time over a period of months. The sculpture was installed with a water droplet positioned over Rory’s eye. Silver catalogued the effect of the dripping water, recording how it eroded his features and gradually collapsed completely having absorbed too much water.
Silver draws upon flux theory, highlighting that all forms and systems are in a constant process of change. There is something unsettling about Silver’s approach which is to first appropriate an object of beauty and admiration for his destructive experiment. The whole performance is underscored by the knowledge that it is his own carefully constructed sculptures which the artist willingly forces decomposition upon, capturing the installation through a series of emotionally removed photographs which show the progressive change. Despite conjuring notions of the fragility of life in his work, Silver manages to celebrate mortality as part of a wider cycle of nature and thus finds an uplifting poetry in the inevitable demise of all things.
Tim Silver completed a BA at the University of Sydney and an MA from the University of New South Wales in 2000). Tim Silver has held several solo exhibitions including The Tuvaluan Project at GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney in 2007. He has participated in several group exhibitions at prestigious locations including the 47th October Art Salon in Belgrade, Serbia in 2006; McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park in Victoria in 2006 and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2002. Silver has been awarded several scholarships and grants including the Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship in 2004 and an Artspace Studio Residency in 2001. His work features in private and public collections across Australia, the UK and the US.
