Artist Statement
Through the lens of a research-based practice, I create interdisciplinary work that examines the scope of our material culture and the effects it has on the natural world. My research focuses on traditional crafting processes including natural dyes, weaving, carpentry, and textile work as a conduit for investigating and documenting particular elements in environments that are products of an anthropogenic ecology. Landfills, strip malls, vacant lots, roadsides, and construction sites, among others, are all contemporary landmarks that offer a starting point for many of my projects. It is within these locations where a peculiar phenomenon occurs, one in which centuries of material use and disposal continues to alter the evolution of the natural ecology, creating an environment where non-native plants from different parts of the world thrive atop a stratum of accumulated man-made materials. It is my goal, through multimedia installations and material-based projects, to confront the role our contemporary consumer culture plays in the evolution of an ecology that dissolves the boundaries between what is natural and what is artificial.
While earlier work has explored natural dyeing through projects that use the medium as a way to catalog the connective feature of color to the natural and manmade materials found in landfills and vacant lots, my current work is exploring a similar materiality through weaving. Materials such as plastic shopping bags, vinyl advertising banners, and videocassette tape are subsequently transformed through weaving, a process that reveals the capabilities of not only the materiality of the resulting work, but is also a way in which the often disposed symbols and materials from an environment centered on consumption can be transformed. For example, the installation, Monotony Arena (2017), is made from spun and woven plastic shopping bags and framed to resemble the layout of a shopping center in Edinburg, Texas.
Artist Bio
Tim is a fiber and mixed media artist originally from Appalachian Virginia. His work focuses on traditional crafting processes including natural dyeing, weaving, carpentry, and many others as a conduit for investigating and documenting particular elements in environments that are products of an anthropogenic ecology. He is a self-taught weaver that uses a variety of non-traditional materials from unexpected sources such as plastic shopping bags, vinyl advertising banners, and videocassette tape.
He received his Bachelor’s degree in Art History from the College of William & Mary (2010) and his MFA in Sculpture and Dimensional Studies from Alfred University (2015). He is also the recipient of a Fulbright Research Grant (2016) to research natural dyes in Arctic Norway. Prior to moving to Houston, he lived near the Texas-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley where he taught sculpture at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas. In September 2019, he will be an Artist in Residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.