About Tim Scrace

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Changing Ways

Like most children, I spent most of my early years looking up, dreaming, wondering, about how things were made, how things stood up and how to create something beautiful.  Nothing much has changed.

My work often takes the form of drawn or painted extracts of the city, which transform themselves into structures or components within the built environment.  The city is my playground.  I have always been fascinated by both the natural and built world.  In search of a lost utopia, I enjoy documenting and shaping spaces, challenging the norm by abstracting the world around me.  

Much like a building project, my work tends to be collated and constructed over a period of years.  Through my practice, I explore phenomenology through memories and space using a variety of media.  The timeless power of sculpture accords with this methodology and has become a dominant force in recent times. Taking time to allow work to evolve enables a dualistic story, a journey documented, a snapshot of both space and time.

In embracing a shift in design and once again turning to concepts in three dimensions I am conscious of an all too familiar functional remoteness. It is almost as if the creation of a physical structure overlooks people and day-to-day life and it is this thought that has left me asking, is this what I want to do?

Where I harbour an interest in caring for the people and the environment, I had hoped to use my skills in place-making and shape-spacing to help cure it. Regrettably, in this rebooted and upside world I am beginning to recognise that the behaviours and passions to make a better world are symptomatic of a human instinct that now threatens it.  

The mantra of build bigger, better, and more beautiful is in our blood, but is also now physically manifested in a climate crisis that will affect ours and future generations.  Whereas I thought I would be drafting an artist’s statement about the power of making positive change through the physical manipulation of space, the pandemic has shown me that we need to rewrite this script and begin anew.

Intuitively I think we all recognise that the silence of a simple life can be more fulfilling, more profound.  A counterpoint to a modern world would be the best place to start.  Rather than celebrating the new I think that the power to share and to reimagine our environments and culture is the key.   

Through my work I hope to highlight dysfunctional dogma and to encourage society to talk more and build less.  To reuse and recycle, to stop pretending to be green and learn how to use and where to find bonifide sustainable materials.  We need to accept a world of the old, the odd, the imperfect, the unfinished is necessary if we are to survive. We need to repurpose and manage the way we live to reduce our impact.   

I believe that removing the noise of material newness would allow us to focus onconversations, on people, on each other. I am keen to develop a practice of care and meaning.  I welcome any opportunities to collaborate, draw attention to and explore the fluidity and the explosion of an architecture of life and people.