Tim Head exhibition at Kettle's Yard

It includes drawings, prints, digital screen works and large-scale projections and  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.

A long-standing 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 and runs until May 9.