John Timberlake
John Timberlake’s practice and research as a fine artist engages principally with photography, painting and drawing, underpinned by the legacies and dialogics of conceptualism. He has made four new works specifically for #100NHSRooms. He says of the works:
“The mental image of endless plains of dry grass, cypress trees and heavy skies is a motif I have worked with repeatedly over the past decade. There are well known art historical precedents for some of these elements: Van Gogh’s wheatfields, Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead are two well-known examples, but this version is my own. This imagined landscape has stayed with me through periods of in-patient care at RLH (Wards of floors 13, 9, 10, 3, CDU, as well as times in Theatre, Interventional Radiology and a High Dependency Unit). As such, it
has come to hold a strong personal resonance. It seems expressive of the tangled mix of emotions associated with the experience of illness, care and recovery: pain, anaesthesia, grieving, disorientation, what it means to receive care, to be well and then unwell again, and a stoic acceptance of that. I am eternally grateful to the caring hands that guide me through.”
John Timberlake, Four Sketches of a Stoic Landscape (1-IV), 2021, Acrylic paint on Fabriano Pintura Paper
John Timberlake, Four Sketches of a Stoic Landscape installed in the Royal London Hospital anaesthetist on-call rooms
Timberlake has focused his practise over the past 20 years to work in and around issues of picturing, photography and realism as a set of problematics, grounding the grand generalities of themes and genres which interest me in the sometimes comedic particularities of the materials or forms he chooses to work with. Timberlake’s work is in a number of public and private collections in Europe and the US, including the Imperial War Museum, London and the West Collection, Oaks, Pennsylvania. Recent exhibitions include: Catalyst: Contemporary Art & War (Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, 2013-14); Homage to January (Division of Labour / Worcester Museum & Art Gallery, 2014) Paysages conçus pour les drones (Galerie des petits carreaux, Paris, 2014) We Are History (Beaconsfield, London, 2014) and Turning Points at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.
