Tim Spellman - ACT artist
Detail of ‘Persistence of masonary’ 2001

OK. Let’s start with some obvious points. Having looked at the photographs before even reading this far it is relatively clear that:

One. Tim Spellman’s works are made from bricks.
Two. They are funny, sensual, formally lovely; less obviously from the photographs but up close and within finger reach they are tactile (if that’s different from sensual and it is, isn’t it?), dextrous (in the sense of technically adept and ‘handy’) and altogether wondrous and new. And still they’ll make you smile if not laugh out loud. So they’re warming too.

Pottery? If defence is needed we might observe that in this age of extending the notions of the media and genres within the arts, and of what art works can be made of, then bricks are technically baked or fired clays of various kinds - and hence a kind of potting. Orthogonal and repetitive though they are - a set of objects like a tea set or dinner service say, but then the repetition is one aspect of some kinds of potting practice . . . bricks too are quite unique - each in its own way. Sure, Spellman doesn’t himself directly fire the bricks; rather he uses them, (not really) as found objects (since he goes about finding them in a very, very focused way), and as the almost literal building blocks of his installations. Yet they are truly the products of constructed and fired clay matter. Fringe or marginally potted then, if we must.
Let’s now step back into something more like conventional essaying.


‘Razed Pinnacle’, 2001

‘Fubscape’, 2001
Tim Spellman is an artist living and working in Canberra. He is a recent graduate with First Class Honours from the ANU’s School of Art, and has begun to exhibit locally and overseas with single works in a number of local shows and the occasional solo show - most recently at the Strathnairn Gallery in Holt, ACT in December 2001. He has also been commissioned to produce a number of community works at the ANU and in public spaces within Canberra’s central business area known as Civic. These works are in what is becoming a signature medium- shaped, fractured and re-worked bricks. The pieces produced are often mounds, or mounds and swales, in combination, pseudo buildings or occasionally bare resemblance to box-like seating arrays. Some seem semi-ritualistic like a ‘henge’ of brick shapes or forms as opposed to standing or oriented stones. They are intriguing, and formally attractive, and often as perusal of the photographs will reveal, humorous (in his titles alone a wry sense of new myth and curious spelling; humour is something sometimes - too often times - frowned on in serious art circles). In many cases people are unable to resist and touch the surface as they should, or in extremis sit on or even within the shaped work (such as ‘Fubscape 2001’, ‘The Persistence of Masonry’, ‘Kulla’s Canberra Connection’, and the hilariously titled ‘Meteoriot’). Curiously (or perhaps Spellman expects it, indeed invites it) this often results in a complex and apparently contradictory effect - the brick work is rough, the curvaceous shapes hard, not necessarily as comfortable or as inviting as they seemed before engaged with. Revisited in this way they are also formally very strong works. Robust to be sure.
‘Meteoriot’, 2001

His work generally covers a wide range of art media - producing paintings (a medium not yet as moribund as the theorists tell us), drawings (an area in which a whole other story about Spellman’s technical innovation lurks), and sculpture. With sculpture he has shown considerable skills with what might be termed ‘classic’ stone and clay work, but it is with the more ‘modern’ handling of various gathered materials ‘built’ into installations that he has found something highly innovative and, better, aesthetically pleasing to a wide audience. The major medium is the brick.

 

These Spellman literally scavenges from any building or demolition site that will allow, or more directly he acquires his medium by purchase from building material recyclers. The beauty of this process of acquisition lies in (at least) two aspects of the brick itself. There is a random-ness in getting recycled and often uncleaned bricks. Spellman doesn’t necessarily know what the shaped brick will be like, where or whether it will break, shape or be coloured as he desires; and simultaneously he can and does choose from some types of brick - for colour, for texture, for the age and shape, or for the method of its making, whether it be ‘full’ so to speak of hollows as some modern bricks are, or the more usually solid. A favourite is the Canberra common - a deeply textured Indian Reddish ochre brick, made some decades ago and typical of the housing from before the seventies in the ACT. Such a brick just speaks age and a certain quality.

For Spellman these bricks also contain some aspects of the history of the city of Canberra. In one sense his installations rebuild that history - something like the way in which medieval churches sometimes - especially in Rome and Italy generally - incorporate or appropriate classical stones and columns into Romanesque, Gothic and later Renaissance architecture. Clearly Spellman’s bricks don’t speak as loudly perhaps as a Corinthian column in the middle of a Gothic wall might, but then Spellman’s installations are decidedly more domestic, dare one say antipodean, and more importantly secretive, as well as expository - A curious dichotomy?
 
Randomness and the way Spellman re-makes the brick exposes a certain, though not the complete, secret of any brick. Moreover, once a partial secret is uncovered there is the feeling that there is more to see, although this is hidden away. Most of Spellman’s brickworks carry this dual burden. Before we expose these secrets too much let’s return for the moment to his methods of re-making the bricks. Some are tumbled and resemble river pebbles. Maybe their secret, partially exposed, is to remind us of what these bricks once were - pieces of natural earth or rock. One might venture the comment that this is an extremely post-modern gesture - Spellman’s pebbles are ironised simulacra of the nature from which they derived.
In other instances Spellman has simply shattered whole bricks and used the fragments as so many shards to re-construct not the original shape but another. Of course the ‘new’ shape was, one might say, always there in the originating group of bricks - it was dormant or in potential (an entelechy, one might philosophically aver), awaiting a new hand to remake it, to find again (and also for the first time) the symmetries and dis-symmetries of the new, the formal line and spatial arrangement which always wanted to happen. Yes, it is as if the bricks wanted to be re-made. Another of the secrets: Is this much different from the potter? I think, little different.

And a third method is to cut the bricks in any direction which seems interesting. Here Spellman particularly likes the newer hollowed bricks which when cut across their orthogonality (on the bias, fabric people might say) display interiors of fascinating complexity - like so many small sky-scraping buildings or the spires of Gaudi-like cathedrals.
Conflating these and other methods of handling his bricks Spellman then constructs his shapes. These mounds, hollows and non rectilinear box-like structures are formally very attractive. More, their surfaces are often semi-smoothed, consisting of a mosaic-like effect of shattered, shaped and/or tumbled pieces. At times this looks like so much a curvaceous dry-stone wall, and at the same time it shows a frozen surface simulating an alphabet soup-like array of what at first look like ‘letter forms’ and accordingly invites the viewer to decipher another set of secrets - glyphs if not actually hieroglyphs. Sometimes (such as with ‘Razed Pinnacle’) the swirling surface of bricks is penetrated by a rising series of simulated pebbles on iron rods ‘growing’ up from the brick seedbed. In some works these fragments appear to be literally images of shattered buildings as if the work freezes an explosion - as ‘Kosovo’ (shown at the exhibition ‘Resistance’ at ADFA Library in 2001) a densely and contemporary political work. True as this reading is, the same pebbles rising from the ruin have been likened to flowers blooming in the hopeful aftermath. That specific political gesture aside, Spellman’s work mostly speaks to the more profound and fundamental myths of human needs to shape and construct things that give pleasure. In this sense his hand is perhaps paradoxically evident everywhere in these seemingly ‘recycled’ brickworks.

Jeff Doyle teaches critical theory, cultural studies, literature, and media in the School of Language Literature and Communication, University College, UNSW, ADFA. His next major publication is Australia’s Vietnam War, jointly written with Peter Pierce and Jeffrey Grey, and published by Texas A& M Press in early 2002. He is the director of a website devoted to Australian Vietnam Veteran Art called AAVE at: http://idun.itsc.adfa.edu.au/SOE/VIETNAM/vietnam/htm or via the ADFA website.

The fuller range of Tim Spellman’s work is available at: http://timspellmanart.dk3.com