Keith Tyson



Keith Tyson

Keith Tyson is a British Turner Prize-winning artist. He works in a wide range of media, including painting, drawing and installation, and he is noted equally for his painting series, such as Nature Paintings (2005 - 2008), and his large-scale sculptures and installations such as Large Field Array (2005). Keith Tyson's work can be characterised as an artistic exploration of some of the basic mysteries of human experience. His artistic motivations lie in an interest in generative systems, and an embrace of the complexity and interconnectedness of existence. Philosophical problems such as the nature of causality, the roles of probability and design in human experience, and the limits and possibilities of human knowledge, animate much of his work. His practice is also defined by a direct engagement with scientific and technological ideas. (Tony 2003)

Keith Tyson was born Keith Thomas Bower in Ulverston in Lancashire, and moved to nearby Dalton-in-Furness when he was four, adopting his stepfather's Christian name Tyson. He showed an interest in and talent for art at an early age, having been inspired by his "very creative and enthusiastic" primary school art teacher. However he left school at the age of 15 without qualifications, and took employment as a fitter and turner with VSEL (Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd., now BAE Systems) in Barrow-in-Furness, building Trident nuclear submarines. (Adrian 2002)

In 1989, he began an art foundation course at the Carlisle College of Art, and the following year he moved south to take up a place on experimental Alternative Practice degree at The Faculty of Arts and Architecture, University of Brighton (1990 - 1993).

It should come as no surprise then, that the work at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been the jumping-off point for some of Keith's most critically acclaimed work. His 2002 exhibition “Supercollider", shown at the South London Gallery in the UK, took its title from the goings on at CERN. The title piece of the exhibition (right) was a giant studio drawing with the subtitle “From the Action of Four Forces on 103 elements within four dimensions, we get…" and needs no explanation to any scientist. Random quotes drawn from everything from planetary charts to entries in anonymous diaries, combined with splashes of colour and pictures of a red-haired model wearing an itsy-bitsy, green bikini, are some of the myriad miscellaneous items that collide on this giant painting and which reflect the wonderful diversity of the world created “from the action of four forces…". Another mixed-media piece, Bubble Chambers: 2 Discrete Molecules of Simultaneity, bursts with random quotes with random dates from 1325 to 2002 dotted across a surface that is crammed with molecules represented as bubbles in reds, blacks, blues, pinks and whites. (Michael 2002)

Both of these pieces are like a mirror held up to the viewer. Look at them both and, inevitably, the temptation kicks in to start drawing conclusions or to make narratives out of the random juxtapositions: the mind's processes writ large. Like much of Keith's work, he ...