Jenny Timmer’s exhibition Crossings : Divides opens at Tension Fine Art in July.
Her work stems from experiences as a child on remote African farms and more recently through her reading and travel. The darkness, the trophies of a hunting culture, the ‘otherness’ of the local people and their customs, and the tensions that existed in the early 1950s Africa which infiltrated her imagination, are all fundamental to her art. An anthropological eye is present in her ethnographical stories. In her interests in and reading of archaeology and anthropology, she has understood that the ancient and universal mind of homo sapiens distils experience, observations and emotions into art and culture.
Timmer’s work unearths locality and personality: these amass in a cultural study and sense of experience and conjecture at the pre-scientific mind in its attempt to make sense of experiences and the world. Her works embody the energies of the relationships between man and their environments manifesting in the language of magic, superstition, belief and ceremony which influence her choice of materials and furnish the language for her work. Often there are reverberations echoing from social and political concerns. She sets her work in series, taxonomies and collections often resembling the anthropologist’s concerns and the presentation often alludes to a collector’s chaos.
In these series of ceramic, clay and concrete masks, made over a period of time, her influences are varied, including the human need to bend identity to new situations – displacement, social status, physical changes, loss, and so on: other influences are those from folk traditions and tribal ceremonies which carry elemental emotions and intuitions.
The masks gather here like an alchemical conference of elemental beings emerging into a material world. By using the form of masks, Timmer insinuates to tribal cultures and, in casting, to death masks. Seeing death masks of Napoleon and William Blake for sale in the National Portrait Gallery in the 1980s was seminal in the idea of using a cast of her own face. Casting has a semblance of ‘being/not being’ and ‘present/absent’ which is also reflected in the title of the show.
Tension Fine Art, 135 Maple Road, Penge, London, SE20 8LP from 7th – 15th July.
Times: Thursday to Saturday 11am – 5pm or by prior appointment.
Website: https://www.tensionfineart.co.uk/
