Keith Tyson
Still Life with Forget-me-nots belongs to a series of paintings that draws together wide-ranging citations in compositions of cut flowers. The stated genre offers the pictorial parameters in which the artist arranged competing references much as a florist arranges bouquets – to this, he describes his still lifes as ‘horticultural’ in attitude. Quoting an array of dissimilar influences (from Modernism to mathematics, abstraction and automation), the repeated motifs of flowers and vases become secondary to the artist’s wider enquiry into globalisation, mass media, and the cultural cross-pollination of images. Painting, Tyson offers, is the primary subject in these works, which are all surface and no sentiment; a bricolage of coinciding signs. “Our world is full of intricately connected systems and events,” he says. “I’m simply trying to make work in collaboration with them.”
b.1969, Ulverston
Pairing scientific methodologies with references encyclopaedic in breadth, Keith Tyson extends reflections on artistic invention as an algorithmic function. An early apprenticeship in nuclear submarine engineering proved formative in his lasting preoccupation with technological programming, which has come to characterise his polyvalent practice across disciplines and mediums. Tyson’s first experiments in artmaking began with The Artmachine (1991–2001), a hybrid invention composed of paper matter, a Macintosh computer, and random-number generators that produced instructions towards discrete works. It offered, he suggests, an alternative art education, the machine necessitating he produce a wide variety of ‘Artmachine Iterations’ in unfamiliar mediums (that said, over 12 000 of the proposals generated remain unrealised). Rule-based seriality continues to offer a working logic, the artist establishing given parentheses that mimic the constraints of computer coding in which to play out repetition and difference. “The problem for me has always been how do you get an individual work to preserve the context of its variations,” Tyson says, “because, ultimately, my work is about both the infinite and the possibilities of the specific.”