Tim is a practising artist and researcher who has developed an eclectic working practice rooted in the overlapping spaces between art, science and literature.
Tim studied painting at Leicester Polytechnic and printmaking at Chelsea College of Art where he received an MA in 1992. He went on to complete a PhD at Chelsea in 1998 and was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship between 2004–8. His work has been exhibited extensively at public venues including the Science Museum, London; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon and PS1, New York. He has also exhibited at Galerie Olivier Houg, Lyon; Houldsworth, London; Rubicon Gallery, Dublin and Briggs Robinson, New York; and has work in various private and public collections.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Gallery
More information
Research interests
For Tim O’Riley, research is a means of thinking, a way to generate a pool of knowledge or experience that can be drawn on and a structure that can enable new ways of thinking and doing. It is a process of looking for something outside one's everyday orbit, whether that thing is an idea, a place, a phenomenon or a process. Research affords the possibility of not necessarily being subservient to the status of an outcome but can foreground the quality of the investigation. While outcomes are of undoubted value, research in this sense nonetheless remains important. One can still be subjective or objective, rational, irrational or unconstrained.
Practice
Tim's practice uses a range of media and has explored relationships between technology and subjectivity, fact and fiction. Tim also uses artist’s books in multiple ways, both to represent objects that are resonant for various reasons—a recent book, Endlessness (2020), reproduces a pair of skis (at actual size across several pages) used on Scott’s ill-fated 1910 Antarctic expedition—and to explore ideas or narratives associated with these objects. Another book, Accidental Journey (2010), was prompted by a chance encounter with a memento from the Apollo 11 lunar mission, an Irish flag that had travelled aboard the historic spacecraft and which now resides at an observatory near Dublin.
Over the years Tim has also been involved in various collaborations with scientists—including a 2001 residency at CERN, Geneva. He last visited CERN in 2008, just before the switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). An artist’s book, Twenty-Seven Kilometres (2013), was based on Tim’s photographs of the LHC as work was being completed on its installation.
Experiences like this have remained touchstones for his thinking: mulling over inner space or incompleteness, or the connectedness of the large and small, can lay a ground from which future work develops.
Current and recent projects
Building on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship he was awarded in 2004, part of Tim’s research and practice is realised in book form. The artist’s book or bookwork can be multiple things: a work in itself; a means with which to embody the thinking around the work; or a way of representing the research that can sometimes lead to work being made in the first place. As well as conflating the artwork with the means of its distribution, the book can also be used to document and represent an activity that exists as an inquiry, perhaps in an ongoing form. It can act as a container for the unexpected. It can also be used to realise and embody the idea that enabled it.
Books include Endlessness (2020), based around a pair of skis used on Scott’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1910—these are reproduced at actual size. It also brings together facts, borrowed text, and new and archival images relating to the expedition and Antarctica more generally. As well as recounting this famous journey, a series of visual and written interludes give a more speculative narrative on solitude, interiority, and vision (Eindhoven: Peter Foolen Editions). Endlessness was nominated for the Prix Bob Calle du livre d’artiste in 2023.
Also, Twenty-Seven Kilometres, which consists of photographs taken during the final installation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland in 2008 (Berlin: Revolver, 2013); A Farmer’s Almanac, based around Native American names for each month's full moon (London: Ponsonby Press, 2011); and Accidental Journey, initiated as a result of a serendipitous encounter with an Irish flag that travelled to the moon on board the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 (London: Ponsonby Press, 2010).
Research Funding
AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design, 2004–2008
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
(2023) Prix Bob Calle du livre d’artiste. Bibliothèque des Beaux-Arts de Paris. France.
(2021) Feuilleton. Edicola Spoleto; MACRO, Rome; Edicola, Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome.
O'Riley, T. (2020) Endlessness. Eindhoven: Peter Foolen Editions.
(2017) Of Average Sunlight. National Poetry Library. London, UK.
O'Riley, T. (2016). The Unassimilable Image. Flusser Studies, 22. [http://www.flusserstudies.net/node/619]
O'Riley, T. (2015). Arts and Science: An Enlightened Approach. Travellers’ Tails seminar series. Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich. London, UK.
O'Riley, T. (2013). Twenty-Seven Kilometres. Berlin: Revolver.
O'Riley, T. (2013). Exactitude and Uncertainty. Impact 8 Printmaking Conference. Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Dundee, UK.
Makela, M. and O'Riley, T., eds (2012). The Art of Research II. Helsinki: Aalto University Press.
O'Riley, T. (2011). A Discrete Continuity: On the Relation Between Research and Art Practice. Journal of Research Practice, 7(1), [https://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/257/238.html].
O'Riley, T. (2011). Accidental Journey. Impact 7 Printmaking Conference. Monash University. Melbourne, Australia.
O'Riley, T. (2011). Chance and Improbability. Flusser Studies, 12. [http://www.flusserstudies.net/node/287].
O'Riley, T. (2011). A Farmer's Almanac. London: Ponsonby Press.
Bury, S. (2011). Artists' Books: Brocade. Art Monthly, 348, p38.
O'Riley, T. (2010). (From) A to B (and back). Printed Project, 13, pp18–23.
O'Riley, T. (2010). Accidental Journey. London: Ponsonby Press.
O'Riley, T. (2009). Speculative Object. In: A. Kaniari and M. Wallace, eds., Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists and the History of the Visual. London: Zidane Press, pp108–9.
(2003) Precise Modern Order. Rubicon Gallery. Dublin, Ireland.
(2002) Signatures of the Invisible. PS1. New York, USA; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Lisbon, Portugal; Centre d’Art Contemporain. Geneva, Switzerland; Complesso del Vittoriano. Rome, Italy; Atlantis Gallery. London, UK.
(2002) Tim O'Riley. Galerie Olivier Houg. Lyon, France.
(2002) Contents. Briggs Robinson Gallery. New York, USA.
(2002) Head On: Art with the Brain in Mind. Science Museum. London, UK.
(2001) Tim O'Riley: Flipside. Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. London, UK.
(2000) Computers and Printmaking. Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, UK.
(1998) John Moores 20th Exhibition. Walker Art Gallery. Liverpool, UK.
