Tim is a multimedia artist—he makes slide-tape works. For one piece, he worked with a Reggae band; for another he worked with a Nigerian Rastafarian and four drummers. Usually he works alone or in collaboration with the composer Arne Hanna or the visual artist Ruth Hingston. He's been making multimedia works for thirty years, collaborating with composers, performers, theatrical directors and visual artists.
Tim enjoys the excitement and the risks of collaboration. He appreciates the depth and richness that collaboration can bring to a work—there’s always something unexpected—and he also admits to ‘one or two disasters’.
Tim combines his photographs with recorded sound and commissioned music. He projects slides onto surfaces, blending the slides one after another to produce a sequence of slowly changing images. He describes a slide-tape work as ‘an invitation to make connections’—an audience is invited to observe not things but relationships between things. Meaning appears in the space between the images.
Tim’s completed works are often idiosyncratic. Usually they are visually rich and alluring. Sometimes they toy with clichés. Always they invite reflection. ‘You’ve got to respect your audience’ he claims. ‘You’ve got to give your audience credit for having brains and imaginations. Leave them space to have their own ideas.’ But he still sees a role for the artist, ‘by the same token, you mustn’t cheat your audience by giving them something empty, something self-indulgent. You have to put in plenty of hard work yourself. Make sure there’s enough substance to justify paying attention.’
Tim’s audio-visual work began in 1980, when he was invited to collaborate with the composer Adrian Keenan. At that time, Adrian was creating musique concrète—he was making music by blending and manipulating environmental sounds on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Tim used equivalent non-digital techniques to blend and manipulate visual images. He did this first in space, in the picture plane, and then, like a sound musician, blended and arranged the images in time. The result, a combination of Adrian’s music and Tim’s slide sequence, was called About Time!.
As a photographer, Tim was originally known for documenting the work of visual and performing artists. Since 1994, most of his work has been a close study of surfaces—their textures, patterns and colours. More recently he has been photographing reflections.
Tim is an independent multimedia artist, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Art, an Adjunct Lecturer the Australian National University College of Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the board of PhotoAccess.
Tim lives with his wife in the capital of Australia. His three daughters and four grandchildren all live in a provincial capital.