Tim Brennan

Tim Brennan’s materials as an artist and curator are the ideologies, artefacts and events associated with ‘public history’, his MA subject at Ruskin College. Brennan has been best known for his ‘manoevures’ – guided walks which introduce alternative takes on landscapes, whether urban and rural; or bring individual life-histories to vivid life; or throw into question our conventional organisation of different bodies of knowledge and disciplines.

As artist-in-residence at the British Museum during the year of its 250th anniversary, Brennan created a series of events and a publication under the title ‘Museum of Angels’. This work catalogued all of the ‘winged creatures’ on display across all of the different collections in the institution, providing an alternative system of classification to this ‘universal museum’ which spans empires and millennia. Each ‘catalogue entry’ offers an oblique or unorthodox commentary on its object. By entangling stories from disparate times and places, Brennan creates an almost Borgesian encyclopaedia, where forms of knowledge stray outside their ‘correct’ domains and illuminate one another anew.

In 2006-7 Brennan published two books. The first, ‘Codex: Crusade’, ostensibly documents the artist’s recreation of the Jarrow March, day for day, over an entire month, culminating in a meeting with Ken Livingstone at Westminster. This 300 mile walk was not merely a feat of endurance or a re-enactment of a moment in our national political story, however. The walk provided the opportunity to interweave Brennan’s own story – drawn out through a diary format – with those of predecessors and fellow travellers; and those in dialogue and disagreement, through the form of a Socratic dialogue. Here, Brennan gives voice to competing stories and diverse characters. ‘Codex:Crusade’ transcends any traditional typology or genre, breaking new ground in how artists’ books can stand alone as autonomous artworks.

The second book, ‘The NORTH’, places Brennan’s most recent body of work into a long history of regionalism. It documents his most recent body of work, created over a three-year period. Originating from Brennan’s performance walks around the region he has labelled ‘greater Northumbria’, the body of work has taken the form of a body of beguiling images which open up alternative histories of how ‘the north’ can be re-read. Northumbria was the greatest centre of learning in Europe during the late middle ages, marked by the greatest concentration of monasteries in Europe. It was also the seat of the country’s first historian, Bede. The idea of ‘the north’ and its representation in images and language, in both history and the present day, have been Brennan’s key concerns since 2004. A series of exhibitions at NGCA, Spacex, and Aberdeen of 15 large-scale images have extended Brennan’s practice into new areas – combining the latest and most democratic technologies of image-making with the aesthetics of British Romanticism.

Alistair Robinson, Programme Director, Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, Sunderland

Biography
Tim Brennan was born in 1966 and studied at Humberside College of FE (1985-88), the Slade School of Fine Art (1988-90) and the Ruskin College Oxford (1996-98). He is engaged in the notion of discursive practice through: performance, photography, sculpture, writing, drawing, painting, curating and teaching. He has shown and performed at a wide range of venues both nationally and internationally including Spacex Gallery, Exeter (2006); Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, Sunderland (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia (2005); Maritime Museum, London (2002); Compton Verney, Warwickshire (2001); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (1999). Brennan is based in Sunderland.