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 ritual and inscription, not as discrete acts, but as intertwined modes through which meaning and presence emerge. Whether making artist books, live works, sculptural installations, textual fragments or photographic constellations, each arises from an economy of gestures: situated, durational and often devotional.

Among these procedures, the Manoeuvre has become a distinctive mode of practice. Emerging in the early 1990s, it reconfigured the guided walk as a discursive form structured through scores, hosting, quotation and situated address. Walking itself is never the objective but one possible means through which dialogue, orientation and cultural memory are enacted.

Across a practice spanning visual art, performance, writing, sound, publication and pedagogy, the continuity lies not in medium but in the underlying grammar of the work. Topogrammatic, Procedural, Transmissive and Institutional practices describe four interconnected modes through which the research is generated, organised and communicated. Together they provide the orientation through which the Scriptorium may be read.

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

Trajectories

Since the late 1980s, my practice has evolved through a polyvalent field encompassing performance, publication, poetic fieldwork, sound, installation, pedagogy, and ritual form.

The work has been presented internationally through exhibitions, performances, publications and commissions, including the 54th Venice Biennale, the British Museum, the National Maritime Museum, Centre Régional de la Photographie/FNAC Dunkirk, and more recently the Athens Digital Arts Festival and Primarolia Festival in Greece. Printed matter, recordings and artist publications have circulated widely, including the broadcast of Vinylarium on BBC Radio 1's John Peel Show in 2002.

Working across the UK and internationally, from Bristol to Berlin, Rome to Quebec, Lublin to Nicosia, I have approached place less as destination than as a field of cultural reading. In 1993 I developed the Manoeuvre, a form of discursive performance structured through guiding, quotation, scores and situated address. Distinct from both theatre and the subsequent discourse of walking art, the Manoeuvre established a procedural grammar that continues to inform the wider practice.

Through these trajectories, the practice has remained less concerned with medium than with the conditions through which meaning is generated, transmitted and situated. Whether realised as a book, performance, recording, installation, conversation or digital work, each project contributes to an ongoing field of inquiry organised through the four interconnected grammars presented within this Scriptorium.

Educational Practice

Education has never been separate from my artistic practice but one of its principal modes of enquiry. Since the early 1990s, my teaching has developed alongside my research, encouraging students to work across disciplinary boundaries and to understand practice not as the application of existing knowledge but as a process of discovery. Whether working in performance, fine art, photography, curating, writing or sound, my emphasis has remained on critical curiosity, dialogue and the development of independent artistic positions.

This approach has informed the development of new areas of provision, including Visual Performance and Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, and early curatorial programmes at Goldsmiths and the University of Sunderland. It has also shaped the supervision of doctoral researchers working across sculpture, creative writing, glass and ceramics, sound, design theory and related fields, reflecting a long-standing commitment to practices that resist conventional disciplinary boundaries.

Alongside this work, I have held professorial and academic leadership roles in the UK and internationally, including Associate Dean at the University of Sunderland and Professorships at Massey University (New Zealand), Manchester School of Art and ARUCAD (North Cyprus). Throughout these appointments, my educational philosophy has remained grounded in dialogue, intellectual generosity and the belief that education is not about prescribing outcomes but about creating the conditions in which original thinking may emerge.

Since 2024, I have worked independently as a Peripatetic Professor of Art. This marks a continuation of my educational practice beyond institutional affiliation. The Peripatetic Professor moves between contexts, working with learners, publics and collaborators through conversation, mentoring, lectures, workshops and artistic projects. It reimagines the professorship not as an administrative appointment but as an ethical commitment to knowledge, hospitality and the shared pursuit of inquiry.

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.

Teaching is understood here as a form of service: a way of thinking alongside others, cultivating intellectual hospitality, and sustaining a dialogue between making and meaning.