06/10/2026
Please join us this Thursday evening for a special celebration of ‘Signals’, Tim Garwood’s latest exhibition at Sim Smith. The opening reception will take place from 6.30pm to 8.30pm with a special ‘In Conversation’ from 7pm to 7.30pm between Tim Garwood and Livia Turnbull, Curator of Contemporary Art at York Art Gallery. Free, entry, all welcome, RSVP essential at [email protected].
Tim Garwood
Location, 2026
acrylic on panel, artist frame
238 × 179 cm (93¾ × 70½ in)
We move through a world of signs and signals, constantly reading and responding to what surrounds us: a gesture, a colour, a sound, a fleeting encounter, a change in the weather. Together, these impressions shape the way we experience the world.
‘Signals’ begins from a similar state of heightened attention for Garwood, specifically from a handful of moments over the past year — uncanny happenings that seemed to carry a significance beyond coincidence. A fallen tree, a terracotta dog unearthed from a garden, the repeated appearance of arrows in unexpected places. These moments seemed to demand a closer look, suggesting that the everyday might be speaking in ways we are not always equipped to hear.
The paintings emerge from this act of listening. Rather than depicting a fixed reality, they follow what reveals itself along the way: unexpected connections, intuitions, memories and chance encounters. Each mark becomes a trace of that process, and each painting a record of an ongoing conversation between intention, energy, the familiar and the unforeseen.
Garwood likens this openness of the senses and connection to our environment to the Latin phrase ‘Solvitur Ambulando’ — ‘it is solved by walking’ — suggesting that some questions can only be answered through movement, time and direct experience.
Bringing together paintings on birch panel, painted photographs and installation in the form of steel agricultural gates, the exhibition explores what it means to look closely, to slow down and to become attentive to one’s surroundings. Rooted in material interrogation and an ongoing investigation into the experience of the world, the works move between observation, abstraction and sensory memory.