Tim Murdoch
"I'm interested both in stretching the capability of inherent material properties and in reclaiming natural, organic form from re-purposed utilitarian objects including various woods, recycled plastics and elemental detritus.", says Tim Murdoch. Originally from Boston Tim has lived in Southern California for 12 years. He taught sculpture for 10 years at Clark University in Massachusetts and currently works in the art department at Palomar College in San Marcos, CA. Tim has shown his work extensively on the east and west coasts of the US as well as in Europe. He completed more than a dozen public art pieces and continues to pursue a rigorous studio practice. Tim's sculptures and installations show evidence of painstaking, meditative, hand- carved process's through which they're made, yet often contain an element of unexpected humor. "I try to push the limits of materials, but also the limits for interface with those materials. I've created sculptures that transform a viewer's expectation of space, utilized public store-fronts to confront the general passerby with psychological questions, harnessed the power Bathe in he timet and lakinted intalatio, mine devastatioave brush fires. It's this combination of materiality with the experiment of human-object reaction and interaction that pique my interest in public art as a human, relatable experience." Tim's work is that of a controlled yet mutable landscape between object and viewer. His work exists as transformations, investigations and aesthetic public environments. "My recent work is an investigation into the natural breakdown of the physical and the way in which we try to order and reorder our world. As humans we form systems of categorization to develop a hierarchy of meaning in an otherwise chaotic world. Tim's current work brings attention to the entropy apparent in human and natural systems of order.
Bio
Tim Murdoch is an artist whose works range from monumental hand-carved wood and plastic sculpture to kinetic installation. He graduated from Montserrat College of Art in 1989 and received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2003. His work has been shown at galleries and alternative spaces in Boston, New York and in Europe. Tim has received a Visual Arts Sea Grant from the University of Rhode Island, a Floating Art Grant from the Fort Point Artists Community, a Blanche Colman Award, and in 2011 was a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship finalist. His public art commissions include two for the Massachusetts College of Art and Design- a 24 ft. hand-carved plastic hanging sculptural installation for the college’s new campus center, and a 25 ft. kinetic wall piece for the Spoon Cafe in the college’s new dormitory. His most recent commission in 2012 is a group of hand-carved and welded plastic sculptures for the Constellation Center in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2012, after twenty years living in Boston, Tim moved to San Diego California where he is concentrating on the development of new works.