(selected by Michael Stanley)
Mountains, 2005
One can imagine that much of Tim Machin’s time is spent turning the pages of the daily broadsheets, a hot mug of tea caressed in one hand, steaming a nearby window pane to create a cloud of condensation and a trickle of vapour, whilst rolling in his other a perfect sphere of blue tack. One can also imagine that making Machin’s art is a little like experiencing it – the deadening humdrum of the passing of time and then the sudden jolt, the sudden epiphany.
Much of Machin’s art takes its cue from these everyday moments of being witness to the passage of time, and the daily newspaper has figured prominently as his diaristic medium and source material. Economic graphs charting the rise and fall of multi-national stocks and shares are delicately removed from the finance pages to form diminutive paper sculptures evoking the summits and valleys of a new and fragile mountainous terrain (‘Mountains’, 2005). Crossword puzzles become the support structure for heavily impregnated chalk drawings and newspaper margins are ‘coerced’ into a horizon line at eye-level (that expands and contracts specific to the gallery space within which it is installed). Machin works, almost forensically, to find narratives and logics that seem to locate themselves within the fibres of the printed page. It is no surprise therefore that his recent contribution to an artist’s anthology took the form of a deconstructed Victorian detective novel. Indeed, his work seems to evoke in many ways, through smell and texture, the ubiquitous cloth-bound A5 book and the ‘democratisation’ of literature that was such a feature of the prolific Victorian printing presses; books on natural history, scientific data and of course anthologies of poems and manifestos of the great Romantics. Machin seems to conflate the encyclopaedic and empirical with the phenomenological and intuitive – the profound with the whimsical.
Allusions to landscape, nature and the escape of Romanticism figure prominently – brooding skies, suggested horizons, soaring birds, snow and even rainbows, are brought to mind with a deft touch. Acknowledgement of the enduring prevalence of landscape imagery and its often hollow promise as orchestrated by the agencies of advertising, media and tourism are playfully explored. Machin’s use and continual return to the picture postcard for instance, sometimes doctored with correction fluid, are tinged with both melancholy and humour. As is his ‘Untitled (Snow)’(2007), in which Machin has extracted the artificial snow flakes from dozens of snow domes purchased from the one single tourist gift shop outside Madam Tussauds to create a glittering pool on the gallery floor. And similarly, in ‘Birds’ (2006), Machin cuts out the silhouettes of over 400 birds from a publication that instructs the reader to recognise various species by the way in which they fly, adhering them to the wall in a manner akin to the decorative spirals of a Richard Wright drawing. There is an honest economy and a most pragmatic of means in Machin’s art – not tokenistic, nor trivialised but a desire to see the very humble and modest elevated to a higher status.
Michael Stanley 2009
Biography
Tim Machin (born 1978, Sheffield) studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, University of Oxford (1996-1999) and Wimbledon School of Art (2001-2002). Shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2001) and Becks Futures (2006), he won the Aspex Gallery’s Emergency2 prize and had a solo exhibition at the Portsmouth-based gallery in 2007.
Recent exhibitions include Between Tracks, Badhaus, St Gallen, Switzerland (2009) and during 2008 100 Years, 100 Artists, 100 Works of Art, Platform for Art, Rochelle School, London; Eskimo Boys Still Eat Whale Blubber, Rhysandhannahpresents, Bristol; NAVIGATOR, The Royal Standard, Liverpool; The Golden Record, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; The Collection, Lincoln; Swap / Vaihto, Bureau, Manchester and The Cable Factory, Helsinki; A Discreet Music, International 3, Manchester.
Machin lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire and is represented by Bureau, Salford.
Artist's website tmachin.co.uk
Bureau bureaugallery.com
