Flip The Script - seascapes

About

The private view to open the exhibition will take place on 23rd September from 6-8pm at the gallery.

About the exhibition

GGI Festival Director Jaco Marais said: “Tim Nathan provides the visual language for something the Good Governance Institute has long understood: that good governance is personal. It’s not just personal for people on boards who are directly involved with governance through their day-to-day activities and responsibilities. Good governance is personal also because every individual has complex needs.

“It is this narrative that is explored by the Flip the Script exhibition and in our Flip the Script festival review. At GGI, we believe in subsidiarity, a long word that simply means bringing decision-making as close to the individual as possible. Our mission is to create a better, fairer world through governance by engaging individuals in their own and collective destiny within society.”

GGI Chief Executive Andrew Corbett-Nolan added: “The exhibition worked so well in London because we combined Tim’s wonderful art work with the art of conversation. We encouraged visitors to engage in discussions with our review article writers and special guests about the mindset, culture and system changes required to flip the script on all sorts of challenges facing society, from sustainability to inclusion.

“As a company, our roots are in Hastings – we already support the arts there through our sponsorship of Barefoot Opera. So we’re particularly looking forward to continuing the conversation about flipping the script in our home town.”

About the artist

Tim Nathan is a multi-disciplinarian artist; a skilled bronze founder, director, music video maker, photographer and designer. He studied in Hastings and Canterbury and has lectured in drawing for over ten years in further education. Whilst being hugely capable in a wide range of creative processes, he perpetually returns to his passion for horses and drawing. He says: “Drawing is a crucial element of making any work. It informs, it is a tool, it is language, it is a criterion for criticism. Through drawing, you can come to terms with the subject matter, and as the by-product of that process sometimes make good work.”

During lockdown, Tim suffered an almost total breakdown, he found his road to recovery from taking pictures each day of the sea in his hometown. Another artist, musician Kevin Armstrong, wrote a song to accompany the exhibition. The song and video capture the emotions we encounter when we view the work.

Reviews

“Each photograph in this series is both a meditation on our relationship with the natural world, and a celebration of its dramatic beauty. Popular psychology recommends engaging with something bigger than ourselves in order to heal a fragile mind, and Tim has described his personal story in relation to the work as a transformative journey from despair to high spirits. Stepping away from the dubious business of ‘self-expression’ he has instead deployed persistence and quiet discipline to record the daily phenomena of the sea. The result is a rich and complex narrative of the undisciplined behaviour of air and water; one in which dark clouds release a veil of rain far from the shore anticipating a storm, a wisp of cloud hovers in an almost clear sky, above a tranquil sea, or a full moon casts a nicotine hue across the dark water. Whilst we recognise the scene, the dramatic sensuality that emerges from each image’s composition and the powerful body of work seen together is less familiar.”

- Gareth Stevens