Commonage is excited to present our inaugural exhibition Tim Spooner A Wave in a Cave at our new basement project space gallery at 53 Old Bethnal Green Road. The exhibition includes a new series of sculptures and drawings that are explorations into unpredictability, the irrational and exercises in balancing control.  Demonstrating a unique handling of materials, including textiles, watercolours, electronics and plastics, Spooner also utilises text to encourage a range of incongruous readings: menacing, sensual, carnal,  educational, absurd, comical, morose….

A series of wall-based sculptures that scratch and twitch, investigate kinesics to embody a variety of sensations, revealing anthropomorphic qualities through the combination of alluring elements. In the drawings, which make use of repetition but with slight variation, figuration tussles with hybrid identities and contradictory functions, knotting the familiar with the fantastical, peculiar, humdrum and somewhat macabre.  As Spooner describes: “Each new picture or object was the seed for making the next one so that the process could be self-propelling. The body of work is quite closed in on itself like a bat or echo flapping or bouncing around inside a cave”

This exhibition follows on from a digital project We were almost in a sad film together for Commonage, available to view here accompanied by an interview with the artist and curator Séamus McCormack.  Both this animation and the new works for this exhibition were created during the period of lockdown, and prompt uncanny responses, sensory awareness and make us think of anxieties caused by ostracism.

For all enquires please email info@commonageprojects.com 

To coincide with the exhibition, Joe Moran, artist and choreographer, will lead the first of our Coffee Date at Commonage sessions details here

Tim Spooner’s work has been presented extensively in theatres and galleries in the UK, Europe and Asia including Battersea Arts Centre (London), b-side festival (Isle of Portland), Cambridge Junction, Mayfest (Bristol), MAC Belfast and DCA Dundee (for Hayward Touring), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Whitstable Biennale, NoD (Prague, Czechia), LASfest (Białystok, Poland), Terni Festival (Italy), TJP Strasbourg (France), Actoral Festival (Marseille, France), Internationales Figurentheater Festival (Erlangen, Germany), STUK (Leuven, Belgium), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon, Portugal), Culture Station Seoul (South Korea), Pesta Boneka Festival (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) and Macau Arts Festival (China). He lives and works in London.