MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY OF: KETTLE'S YARD

The exhibition of recent work by Tim Head, Tim Head: Raw Material, includes drawings, prints, digital screen works and large-scale projections. It draws together a body of work, produced over the last eight years, that exploits both the current resources of digital technology and the traditional tools of drawing at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge from 20 March - 9 May 2010.

A longstanding interest in perception motivates Head’s latest explorations into the various mechanics of production, from physical pen and paper to ethereal digital projections. Focusing on process at both extremes, Head’s work is about visual experience in its ‘raw’ state, detached from the predetermined world of images.

Tim Head has consistently used different media with a view to understanding their effect on what they represent. Having made work using a number of different image technologies, including photography, Xerox machines and inkjet printers, he has spent the last ten years working directly with computers – while at the same time going back to the basics of drawing.

Describing his approach to drawing, Head has said: “Make a drawing. Not a drawing of something but a drawing that is somehow just a drawing. Is it possible? What would that be?”

The same could be said of his approach to digital media. Working with programming specialists, Head has developed computer programs that generate, in real time, simple visual events in unrepeatable combinations that appear as dazzling, pulsating grids or bands of coloured light on screen and as projections.

In 1977, Tim Head was appointed the first artist fellow at Kettle’s Yard and Clare Hall. More than thirty years later, this exhibition provides a welcome chance to catch up with his latest work, and also revisit some of the work he made during his fellowship here in 1977-78.

Tim Head: Raw Material has been curated by Sotiris Kyriacou and organised by Huddersfield Art Gallery and Kettle’s Yard. The exhibition at Kettle’s Yard includes additional recent and early works.

Tim Head was born in 1946 in London. He studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 1965 to 1969, where his teachers included Richard Hamilton and Ian Stephenson. In 1968 he went to New York where he worked as an assistant to Claes Oldenburg, and met Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, John Cale and others.

He studied on the Advanced Sculpture Course run by Barry Flanagan at St Martin's School of Art, London, in 1969. In 1971 he worked as an assistant to Robert Morris on his Tate Gallery show. From 1971 to 1979 he taught at Goldsmiths College, London. In 1987 Head was awarded First Prize in the 15th John Moores Exhibition.

Head has exhibited widely internationally. His solo shows include MoMA, Oxford (1972); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1974 and 1992); British Pavilion, Venice Biennale (1980); ICA, London (1985); and Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany, and touring (1995). He has taken part in group shows including Documenta VI, Kassel (1977); British Art Now: An American Perspective, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Royal Academy, London (1980); The British Art Show, Arts Council Tour (1984); Gambler, Building One, London (1990); and Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-75, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000).

For more about the exhibition visit the Kettlesyard website here.
Visit Tim Head’s web site here.

To find out more about Paul Harter, the computer programmer who assists Head with some of his works visit his website here.