Tim Sandys-Renton

Tim produces both large and small sculptures, mostly welded out of hammered/bent steel or copper sheet or bronze. He combines figurative elements/motifs with abstract frameworks made to support them in space.
Material: Sculpture is about materiality, slowness and ‘the hand’. It is the antithesis of the immaterial digital world. Steel is at once traditional and modern, aggressive, and pliant, and the welding process highlights its heated, modelled, and bashed roughness.
Themes: Decorative plates (referring to protective Aboriginal shields and their ancestral patterns), heads & gesturing hands (classical sculpture, anthropology, and mythology), clothing, collars and pinstripes (social structures), power or lack of it (religious/secular, political, commercial/spiritual), upside-down-ness (gravity) emptiness and lack of function.
Approach: Tim sees making Art as a way of finding things out, making unexpected connections, giving a voice to dumb materials, having a conversation with his imagination; he’s not interested in creating objects that illustrate, define, or fix things, or that repeat things he consciously knows already!
Inspiration: Tim’s work takes inspiration from the British ‘Geometry of Fear’ sculpture movement from the 1950s (i.e. Paolozzi, Reg Butler and Lyn Chadwick) amongst others.
Tim is Programme Coordinator for the Fine Art BA at the University of Chichester.