Sim Smith is delighted to present Signals, Tim Garwood's latest exhibition at the gallery.
We move through a world of signs and signals, constantly reading and responding to what surrounds us: a gesture, a colour, a sound, a fleeting encounter, a change in the weather. Together, these impressions shape the way we experience the world.
Signals begins from a similar state of heightened attention for Garwood, specifically from a handful of moments over the past year — uncanny happenings that seemed to carry a significance beyond coincidence. A fallen tree, a terracotta dog unearthed from a garden, the repeated appearance of arrows in unexpected places. These moments seemed to demand a closer look, suggesting that the everyday might be speaking in ways we are not always equipped to hear.
The paintings emerge from this act of listening. Rather than depicting a fixed reality, they follow what reveals itself along the way: unexpected connections, intuitions, memories and chance encounters. Each mark becomes a trace of that process, and each painting a record of an ongoing conversation between intention, energy, the familiar and the unforeseen. Garwood likens this openness of the senses and connection to our environment to the Latin phrase Solvitur Ambulando — ‘it is solved by walking’ — suggesting that some questions can only be answered through movement, time and direct experience.
Bringing together paintings on birch panel, painted photographs and installation in the form of steel agricultural gates, the exhibition explores what it means to look closely, to slow down and to become attentive to one’s surroundings. Rooted in material interrogation and an ongoing investigation into the experience of the world, the works move between observation, abstraction and sensory memory.
The landscape here is not simply rural or natural. The work considers the relationships between ecology, the built environment, technology and everyday experience — the overlapping systems through which contemporary life is lived. Against a culture of acceleration and constant information, the exhibition returns to the immediacy of looking: to what can be noticed when we remain in a place long enough for its quieter signals to emerge.
Large gates painted by the artist are installed within the exhibition space, creating physical thresholds that the viewer must pass through to encounter the paintings beyond. They function simultaneously as objects, barriers and invitations — structures that direct movement while asking what it means to enter, cross and look. Their presence makes walking part of the work itself, as the viewer follows a route through the exhibition, encountering possible directions and shifting points of attention.
The photographs isolate fleeting details — solitary desert flowers, screenshots of songs playing through an iPhone, road markings — that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Garwood highlights similar moments in his relationships, with photographs of himself and his son appearing alongside images of landscape. Rainbow light dispersions appear across their faces, refracted through sunlight hitting a crystal.
The crystal becomes a metaphor for the openness required to receive such encounters. Just as it reveals colours already present within the light, an uncanny event can bring something into consciousness that was perhaps already latent within us. Rather than creating meaning, the event provides the conditions for something previously concealed to become visible. Painted arrows intervene across the photographs, signalling points of attention: look here; notice this; continue this way. They echo the experience of walking, where the landscape is encountered through a succession of signs, each inviting the eye — and the body — onwards.
The paintings extend this investigation through the physicality of birch panel, allowing material and surface to become part of the encounter. Great billows of thinly veiled paint allow the grain of the wood to seep through, creating a porous, shifting surface against areas of more densely built-up paint. Constellations of marks gather and disperse across the panels, while painterly structures seem to emerge almost from nowhere — appearing, receding and re-forming as the eye moves across the surface. The paintings hold a tension between what is revealed and what is obscured, between the material presence of the wood and the accumulating traces of the artist’s hand. Rather than depicting the landscape literally, they explore the sensations and perceptual shifts that arise from spending time within it: changes in light, colour, texture, atmosphere and scale.
Aspects of the artist’s life, including fatherhood and a move to Somerset, quietly underpin this renewed attentiveness to place, time and the rhythms of everyday life. These experiences bring an awareness of the ordinary — of repetition, change, growth and the passing of time — and of the ways in which our surroundings shape how we feel and move through the world.
At the heart of Signals is the idea that attention requires time. Walking, looking and remaining in a landscape can create a gradual settling, allowing us to become quieter and more receptive. In this slower state, details begin to register as signals; connections emerge and familiar surroundings can become newly strange. The exhibition asks the viewer not simply to look, but to move, cross, pause and notice. The route through the work becomes part of its meaning: a physical act through which perception deepens and direction is discovered through experience.
