Western Morning News (Saturday)
Politically charged and poetical works that will stop you in your tracks
FRANK RUHRMUND takes a look at a confrontational solo exhibition in St Ives, by artist Tim Shaw
An old battle cry of Irish origin, the title of the exhibition by sculptor Tim Shaw RA, ‘Fág an Bealach’ now being held in the Anima Mundi Gallery, St Ives, comes from a late 18th to mid-19th century mummer’s folk-play when it was used by the first player on stage to ‘Clear the Way’ for all that was about to follow.
Something it does in room one on the gallery’s second floor with its series of 2D and 3D works, half a dozen small scale bronze figures alongside a series of larger maquettes in raw wax, straw and rag, that make up The Mummer’s Tongue Goes Whoring Among The People. Not all that surprising perhaps, as Tim Shaw often stops viewers in their tracks, asking them to think at least twice if not more about what all they are seeing. An acclaimed but confrontational artist, he clears the way in all three floors of the gallery, bringing together seemingly disparate strands from a number of his most recent multi-media sculptural and installation projects and presenting them together, as it were, under one physical and metaphysical umbrella.
Born in Belfast in the mid-1960’s, Tim Shaw grew up in troubled Northern Ireland and, not surprisingly, his work often echoes, in particular, the disturbed and violent years of the 1970’s. An artist who studied at Manchester Polytechnic and at Falmouth College of Art, since his graduation from the latter establishment in the late 1980’s, his list of credits has been considerable. Elected as a Royal Academician in 2013, in the same year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors and of Falmouth University. Winner of the Threadneedle Prize in 2008 for his Tank on Fire, his takes on such things as terrorism and the Iraq War gave rise to his work being called: “The most politically charged yet poetically resonant new work on show in London.”
As recently as 2015/16, he was appointed Artist Fellow at the Kate Hamburger Centre for Advance Study as “Law as Culture” in Bonn, Germany, where The Birth of Breakdown Clown was created, fusing advanced robotics and artificial intelligence with sculpture.
One who has exhibited extensively, in Cornwall from St Ives to Truro, and further afield from Bath to Brighton to London in this country, and from Belfast to Dublin in Ireland, Tim Shaw has also carried out several commissions, among them The Rites of Dionysus for The Eden Project, and The Drummer, Lemon Quay, Truro, not forgetting either
The Minotaur for The Royal Opera House, or the portrait bust of the celebrated Irish poet Seamus Heaney. An award-winning artist who has always been driven by the desire to say something about human existence, unafraid to look at the horror and futility of wars and those who make them, he has been described as one of the great storytellers of British art; no one questions what lies at the core of the human condition, or examines the essence of existence in relation to the moral conflicts facing today’s world, at the atrocities of war or the transgression or enlightenment of ritualism, or even how quickly we have become reliant on digital technology, in quite the same way as he does.
Soul-searching, raw but rewarding, and well worth a visit, Tim Shaw’s Fág an Bealach (Clear the Way) can be seen in Anima Mundi, Street-an-Pol, St Ives, admission free, until April 4. Look out, too, for the promised burning of the installation Lifting the Curse when the show closes.