Tim Spooner / A Wave in a Cave
curated by Séamus McCormack
June 4 - July 17, 2021
Commonage
53 Old Bethnal Green Rd
London E2 6QA
Image Credits: Installation views Commonage, Photography Reinis Lismanis.
A series of wall-based sculptures that scratch and twitch, investigate kinesics to embody a variety of sensations, revealing anthropomorphic qualities through the combination of alluring elements. In the drawings, which make use of repetition but with slight variation, figuration tussles with hybrid identities and contradictory functions, knotting the familiar with the fantastical, peculiar, humdrum and somewhat macabre. As Spooner describes: “Each new picture or object was the seed for making the next one so that the process could be self-propelling. The body of work is quite closed in on itself like a bat or echo flapping or bouncing around inside a cave”.
This exhibition follows on from an earlier digital project for Commonage We were almost in a sad film together, available to view on our website alongside an interview with the artist. Both the animation and the new works for this exhibition, all created during the period of lockdown, prompt uncanny responses, sensory awareness and make us think of anxieties caused by ostracism.
Tim Spooner’s work has been presented extensively in theatres and galleries in the UK, Europe and Asia including Battersea Arts Centre (London), b-side festival (Isle of Portland), Cambridge Junction, Mayfest (Bristol), MAC Belfast and DCA Dundee (for Hayward Touring), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Whitstable Biennale, NoD (Prague, Czechia), LASfest (Białystok, Poland), Terni Festival (Italy), TJP Strasbourg (France), Actoral Festival (Marseille, France), Internationales Figurentheater Festival (Erlangen, Germany), STUK (Leuven, Belgium), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon, Portugal), Culture Station Seoul (South Korea), Pesta Boneka Festival (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) and Macau Arts Festival (China). He lives and works in London.
Commonage is a space for testing new ideas that encourage commonality, experimentation and dialogue, through online projects, events and exhibitions. Exhibitions are presented in our project space gallery, which sits alongside a café, architecture design studio to create cross-pollination, collaboration and integration into this hybrid environment by facilitating conversations between individual and collective creative processes. Online projects are another way to test work through screenings, writing and other digital outputs. Commonage is programmed by Séamus McCormack and shares the site with The Common E2 and Common Ground Workshop and operates with their support.