Ben Timmins was born in Dannevirke and raised on a farm nestled
in the foothills of the Ruahine Ranges. Influences from his
formative rural years are strongly present in his work and have
been broadened by cultural experiences gained from overseas travel
and education.
In an early series of work, 'Memory Pulsation', Timmins explored
the link between the subconscious mind (in particular, the function
of memory) and the visual image through the abstraction of
recognisable elements of landscape and figure in a post-surrealist
fashion. Timmins' choice of found, aged and weathered surfaces as
basis for his painting added a sense of endurance, and reinforced
the idea of the nostalgic image projected directly onto the
appropriate working base and subtly enhanced with found
objects and photographs. As Timmins explains, "this
series of paintings is an exploration of
what predominantly surfaces as memory. Past is past; memory,
however, operates subtly within the present and seems to have a
pulse or rhythm of it own."
More recently, Timmins' work has evolved to include the
substrate even more predominantly as a feature in the work, thereby
engaging a conversation between the painting's support and the
represented image. Elements of the raw and textured surfaces such
as nail holes in recycled panels and the grain of sheets of marine
ply play a specific role in the works, adding to the illusory sense
of a mental image projected onto a surface whose contours are
unworked and uncontrolled by the artist, like a film projected onto
the wall of a corrugated iron farm shed.