For Tim Hollins, “Sculpture is visual poetry, form imbued with meaning”.
Each line of a poem adds to the power of the whole, making us gasp with recognition and understanding of some greater truth. In the same way, each sculptural line builds a form that extends beyond the piece and, at its best, says something we instinctively know about the human condition or the universe. Physical form gives it expression. As artist Paul Klee said: “The role of the artist is not to reproduce the visible, but to make visible.”
Poetry of form is to be found in both figurative and abstract sculpture, and Tim explores both. There’s a deep and rich abstraction in the multiple curves of the human body, going well beyond reproducing the visible; equally, there is a wonderful and mysterious note of recognition in purely abstract forms, rendering visible something we know yet cannot see.
Art reminds us what a wonderful and diverse world we live in. It opens the mind, nudges the imagination and lifts us from day-to-day thoughts and constraints. In his sculpture Tim seeks to evoke these responses. His work is to be touched, with the eyes and the fingers, but above all to be felt, at the root of our emotions. There is no more powerful statement of the interpretive role of the artist than Barbara Hepworth’s: “I, the sculptor, am the landscape, the hollow, the thrust and the form.”
The ideas Tim Hollins expresses in his work have been developed through personal experience in different stages of his life. His skills were developed through study at London’s Art Academy, Central St Martins and elsewhere. Working largely in bronze and wood, he has his studio close to London’s South Bank, and has also written about the many sculptures to be found along the South Bank’s river walk. Among other projects is an ambition to create a London Sculpture Park, a linear park stretching from Westminster Bridge to Tate Modern.