I practice art as invocation — calling something forward through movement, utterance, assembly, and artefact

Taking Coals 2014. A night manoeuvre from Hetton to Sunderland as part of AV Festival North East England (UK)

Tim Brennan guiding a group along the route of the world’s first private railway line — the Hetton to Sunderland line, built in 1822 to carry coal from the Durham coalfields to the coast. From there, premium coal was shipped by collier vessels to London.

My practice unfolds within a field shaped by the performativity of ritual and inscription — not as discrete gestures, but as entwined modes through which meaning and presence are enacted. Whether making artist books, live works, sculptural installations, textual fragments, or photographic constellations, each element arises from an economy of gestures: situated, durational, and often devotional.

Walking has been one such gesture — not as an end in itself, but as a vector for relation, hosting, and poetic address. Since the early 1990s, I have explored the guided walk as a form distinct from the lineage of solitary perambulators. My use of guidebooks, scores, and situated texts positioned walking as a social and narrative act — a live choreography of discourse and landscape.

Across my polyvalent practice — encompassing visual art, performance, poetry, publication and pedagogy — the work persists in probing how acts, texts, and artefacts accrue their charge. The throughline is not medium, but method: a field practice attentive to the thresholds between body, word, and world.

The sociality of space, that makes it a place, is just the trace of human intentionality

Trajectories

Since the late 1980s, I’ve moved through a polyvalent practice shaped by performance, publication, poetic fieldwork, and ritual form.

I’ve performed and exhibited internationally — from the 54th Venice Biennale to the British Museum, from Centre Régional de la Photographie / FNAC Dunkirk to the National Maritime Museum. In 2023, a collaborative web-browser poem with Ilektra Maipa was shown at the Athens Digital Arts Festival and the Primarolia Festival in Agio. My photographs, printed matter, and artist records have circulated widely — including the full play of Vinylarium on BBC Radio 1’s John Peel Show in 2002.

I’ve worked across the UK and internationally — from Bristol to Berlin, Rome to Quebec, Lublin to Nicosia — not as a tourist of styles but as a reader of social space. In 1993, I initiated the manoeuvre — a guided-walk form that fused poetics, gesture, and site. Unlike conventional performance or walking art, the manoeuvre developed its own grammar of attention. It prefigured what would later become a broader wave of “art-walking” practices, though mine was always more liturgical than locative.

My projects unfold in many forms: browser-based rituals, sculptural scores, essays-as-artefacts, speculative tour-guides. Whether in a museum, woodland, or book fair, I remain tuned to the performativity of place — to the trace of human intention that renders it such.

Recognition

Over the years, my work has found its way into collections and archives across the UK, Europe, and North America. These include Printed Matter (New York), the Mass Observation Archive (University of Sussex), the Stuart Hall Library (Iniva), and the Centre Régional de la Photographie (France), among others.

Artist books, documentation, and performance ephemera are also held by institutions such as the Live Art Development Agency, MMU Special Collections, UCA Archives, Scottish Poetry Library, and 1:1 Projects Rome.

Alongside exhibitions and performance histories, this quieter archival presence continues to shape the long memory of my practice — a kind of slow resonance in print drawers, databases, and readers’ hands.

Educational Practice

Since the early ’90s, my teaching has unfolded in dialogue with my research practice. I’ve taught across a wide spectrum — from performance, drama, and theatre to fine art, photography, curating, and music — always encouraging students to work across disciplines rather than stay tethered to one.

I played a founding role in the development of new areas of provision, including Visual Performance and Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, and the first curatorial programmes at Goldsmiths and the University of Sunderland. I’ve supervised PhD candidates in sculpture, creative writing, glass and ceramics, sound, and design theory — reflecting my interest in practices that operate across fields.

Institutionally, I’ve held leadership and professorial roles in both the UK and abroad — including Associate Dean at the University of Sunderland, and Professorships at Massey University (New Zealand), Manchester School of Art (UK), and ARUCAD (North Cyprus).

My teaching remains grounded in accessibility, experimentation, and the transformative capacity of critical-creative inquiry.

Since 2024, I’ve worked entirely independently. As a Peripatetic Professor of Art, I operate without fixed institutional affiliation — forming bespoke, embodied engagements with learners, publics, and collaborators. This role reasserts the Professorship as a conferred and ethical calling rather than a functional job title. Rooted in dialogue and critical generosity, the Peripatetic Professor moves across contexts — not to replicate institutional structures, but to reimagine pedagogy as artistic manoeuvre.

A Drawing Ceremony Tim Brennan leading a WALKshop for the Annwn Art School Tour with BA Fine Art students at Hull College of Art & Design, 2024.

In these walkshops, I approach teaching as co-enquiry — where conversation, material play, and shared attentiveness replace instruction. The studio becomes a site of unfolding, not delivery.

I hold to the old notion that teaching is a form of service: a way of thinking alongside others, cultivating intellectual hospitality, and sustaining a dialogue between making and meaning.