Timothy Sawyer Shepard is an American collage artist working with paper, photography, cine film and music. He considers collage a metaphor for memory, consciousness and perception, themes which permeate his work. The landscape collages of Timothy Shepard merge several practices which gave much of 20th century art making its tension. Those being painting and photography and the interaction between the two. On the one hand they represent nature in a painterly way and on the other rely on photography to arrive at their representation of reality.
Archive ink printed on Hanhnemuhle etching paper, 2012, signed in pencil.
36 x 50 cm
Edition of 50
Inspired by Suffolk
57 x 110 cm
2021
Signed and numbered from edition of 3
Inspired by Suffolk
57 x 110 cm
2021
Signed and numbered from edition of 3
Inspired by Suffolk
Music has been a consistent aspect of my art practice - and has appeared through works for musicians (Paul Weller, Kevin Ayers etc) and the music compositions I make myself which meticulously combine numerous music fragments sampled from hundreds of old 78’s and junk store records.
From hundreds of photographs taken whilst walking the Sailor’s Path, over 600 elements have been cut and orchestrated to form a single scene recalling the landscape which informed so much of the music of Benjamin Britten through his ‘composing walks’ and which in turn combined with my own impressions and memories of the landscape through playing Lp’s of Turn of the Screw and Peter Grimmes quite continuously in my studio whilst working on this piece.
Artists Proof. Archive ink printed on Dai-oban sized sheet of Ichibei Iwano washi paper
42 x 30.5cm
Framed
2024
Timothy Sawyer Shepard.
Shepard’s works are sly in the way they evoke the truth of nature and yet that truth is created whole cloth from a media of mechanical reproduction. In this way they evoke the American tradition of the natural miniaturist Joseph Cornell and Nell Jenney while referencing the recent European tradition of painterly hyperreality.
Work on a Landscape Collage begins within a particular landscape or place, and the overlaying of impressions and perceptions in the artist's mind. Shepard uses a camera to capture and record this experience, photographing the numerous individual elements which unselfconsciously catch his eye, but which nevertheless combine to form a memory of the place. Back in the studio, the artist reassembles these elements, layer upon layer. Hundreds of image fragments form the final picture, with a fluidity and interconnectedness that express both the actual and imagined - an omnijectivity of the plural viewpoint. This is how the mind conceives the landscape - both in the present of seeing it, and creatively as a memory. Memory is a collage.
Shepard has created a number of album covers, including Paul Weller 22 Dreams (2008), and Kevin Ayers, The Unfairground (2007), which Shepard also co-produced. He has also created a number of music videos usually working with super8 film including for Kevin Ayers, The Go-Betweens, Terry Edwards and Bandante (George Vjestica - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds).
In 2003 was invited to be Artist in Residence at the Centre de Sculpture in Montolieu in the Montagne Noir, France. This residency lead to a commission from the French Ministry of Culture in a pilot scheme of inviting artists to interact with historic monuments and buildings.
Between 2008 and 2015 had a studio in the small hamlet of La Galaube, 10km north of Montolieu up in the Montagne Noir. It was here amidst the extraordinary primordial beauty of a mountain wilderness landscape that he made work in a roof top studio alongside innumerable spontaneous landscape interventions created during hikes in the mountain.
Notable Exhibitions:
Grosvenor Street Art Space, London (2013)
The National Centre For Atmospheric Research, Boulder Colorado (2012-13)
The Lookout (Caroline Wiseman Modern & Contemporary) (2014)
Shepard has also exhibited with: Zeitgeist Arts Projects, Charlie Dutton Gallery, Caroline Wiseman Modern & Contemporary, London Art Fair, 20/21 British Art Fair, Standpoint Gallery and Collyer Bristow Gallery. His works hang in private collections in the USA, UK, Japan, France and Germany.