How does one capture the intuitive content of a creative gesture and use it as a substrate for form? This is the question posed by Tim Dempers’ work. His 3 dimensional paintings challenge our perceptions of fixed identity using digital media to explore new possibilities in painting.

In “Code Unknown” (200x200x80cm), curving fibreglass strips undulate rhythmically around a transparent frame. The curves were generated using a parametric modelling technique, developed in collaboration with mathematician Dr Alex Scott. The computer code they developed uses Tim’s rough, two-dimensional sketches or “visceral gestures” as catalysts to generate coherent, three-dimensional structures in a time-based animation software. His interest in exploring the relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space and painting and architecture, is further developed in “Point Cloud”, an “inflated canvas that aims to expand the creative surface within the constraints of a fixed frame”, employing a pneumatically inflated ETFE cushion.

In “Matters of Appearance” (2m x2m x 65cm), vertical and horizontal strips of painted aluminium wrap around a painted steel frame. This woven tectonic is taken further in “Time Dust”, a 2m cubed carbon fibre and aluminium mesh structure where the brushstrokes break free from the constraints of the frame altogether and weave through each other in a labyrinth of wondering lines. Rather than describing static objects these gestures remain suggestive of a multiplicity of vibrating and oscillating forms. In this context identity becomes a problem of visibility; as what appears is only ever an instant of time, caught in the perpetual process of dissolution and recomposition.

Dempers’ interrogation of the gestural processes involved in creative practice undermines the conventional perception of the inherent stasis of the aesthetic artefact. By harnessing "the entropy of a line” Dempers proffers a new paradigm from which to understand the synthesis of form and content.