Still Life

In a career that has spanned over thirty years, Tim Head has created works in such a variety of media that it is difficult to identify one particular characteristic. From early installations in which he layered projected images of objects over real objects, to his current explorations in digital media, it would be easy to describe Head’s chameleon-like transformations as mirroring the changing nature of technology. But this would ignore Head’s experimentation in painting in the early 1990s, just at a time when many in the art establishment were pronouncing its demise. Head is constantly questioning what we perceive to be, and what we know to be, the truth. To put it simply, he is concerned with optical phenomena, challenging us to make sense of a world in which there is, arguably, no meaning beyond the surface tension – just a collection of light and shadows. From layering slide projections on top of one another to repeating and reducing familiar motifs, Head manipulates the intrinsic meaning of an object or image. There are also environmental concerns at play. In the early 1980s, he critiqued excessive consumption in a series of lurid photographs featuring hundreds of tiny plastic toys and a rich, candy-coloured material floating like scum on a toxic sea. He also painted familiar consumer motifs, like the Happy Eater logo, which were repeated and manipulated as a way of exploring ideas of genetic mutation.

Head studied under the visionary Pop artist Richard Hamilton at Newcastle University in the mid 1960s. By the late 1960s, he was living in New York and working as an assistant to the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, famed for his public art replicas of everyday objects. Returning to London in the 1970s, Head began teaching at Goldsmiths’ College. In 1977, he was artist in residence at Clare Hall in Cambridge, and it was here, in 1978, that he made Still Life. The installation consists of a photograph of a brick wall against which a variety of objects have been placed, including a chair on which a naked woman sits. The image is then turned upside down and re-projected in negative onto the same wall. The result is an uncanny layering of imagery that leaves the viewer completely disorientated and unable to distinguish reality from fiction.

(C) Jessica Lack 2009