Tim Chalk

Tim Chalk interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 8th March 2017

0:05:11 Born in 1955 in Glasgow; I am a first-generation Scot; my parents came to Glasgow in 1950 so I grew up there very much as an English refugee; in the 50s and 60s, regardless of being born there, if you weren't a Glasgow family you didn't grow up with any impression that you were Glaswegian; I reached the age of 18 and it came to a point where I was choosing where to go and study, and I thought I would go back to England although I had never lived there; it was only when I started going to universities for interviews that it dawned on me that I was actually Scottish; both my parents came from Devon; my father was a classics teacher; his first post was in Exeter University, and he came up to teach at Glasgow University and taught there for the rest of his life; coming to Glasgow in 1950 it was a complete other world for them; looking back on it my upbringing and childhood were completely unrecognisable things for both of them; I suppose it was quite common for people of our generation that the world changed so much anyway regardless of where you lived, but just the extra fact that they had come up into the alien world of Glasgow in the 50s from rural Devon

2:42:04 On my father's side my grandfather was Vicar of Uffculme, a wool-milling town just outside Tiverton in Devon; he came from a family in Essex - the Chalks of Redhill; he had been in the City and then quite late in life he suddenly decided to leave the City and go into the Church; he was quite an old parent and was about fifty when my father was born; my father had three older sisters and one younger sister, so quite a late child; my grandmother, although younger than my grandfather, was an older mother as my father was the fourth child; her family name was Ormerod and they were a medical family; in class terms they were the much superior family, which they never failed to tell my grandfather; my father grew up with the notion that the Chalks were just a humdrum lot and it was the Ormerods that mattered; his reaction was to have an absolute antipathy to the Ormerods; I think growing up in Scotland, detached from the family, we were really oblivious of all that baggage; my mother was born in Malaya and my grandfather was a civil engineer in the Colonial Service; she was sent back with her sister in that time-honoured way to a boarding school in England, and then grew up being shipped round to various relatives only seeing her parents every four years when they came on leave; she did talk about it, and it was her experience that cemented my life as a day student at school; as a result of her experience she was absolutely adamant that none of us should be sent away to school; my father was at Marlborough and there was a very strong family assumption that I should go there too; my mother refused and I went to a day school in Glasgow, and I'm very grateful for that

6:08:12 My earliest memory is my third birthday; I remember blowing out the candles at my birthday tea; my mother always made very elaborate model birthday cakes; this was a steamer, the 'Queen Mary' I think, with three funnels; I can remember everyone singing "Happy Birthday..", joining in, and everyone laughing, and being very upset because I didn't know why they were laughing; my father was an artist-manqué, and if he had not been born in the world he was in he would have become a painter; he was a very talented painter and painted all his life, and increasingly I think his job became a distraction; he always encouraged me a lot and I grew up assuming that people drew, and I remember this moment where I thought fathers had sketchbooks because my father always carried a little black 'Bushy' book, a particular brand, with a garter elastic binding; he always had it in his pocket and if you went for walks you'd either have to hang around or go on ahead while he would sketch; we grew up used to the fact that you'd get up to go somewhere and he'd tell us to stop as he was drawing us; so I grew up drawing all the time; my father used to bring back old exam scripts which we used as scrap paper; I have got one or two things that my parents kept which we found when we were clearing the house; it meant that I was very lucky because I was always encouraged and when it looked like that was the way I was going, unlike lots of friends of mine who had to fight all sorts of parental resistance, I was really encouraged to take the route I did; I always felt very spoilt in that respect

10:00:19 I went to Glasgow Academy which was very much the heart of the establishment of Glasgow and peopled by the wealthy of Glasgow; I was really unhappy there; it was an all-boys school, and being fair on it now it was probably a perfectly good school, but a lot of it was that it was so much part of the Glasgow establishment, and Glasgow was very closed and I felt a complete outsider being from an English family; I stayed there until I was eleven when my parents wondered why they were struggling to pay the fees when I hated it; I was sent to another school which was semi-independent, attached to the Glasgow Teacher Training College, so it was a State school but wasn't quite within the State system, although while I was there it became a comprehensive school, and that was much more a mix of people from different backgrounds; I enjoyed it more but school wasn't a particularly happy experience for me at any stage really; it wasn't a place I felt at home with and I didn't mix easily with my peers; on subjects, art was always important, and academically I was always pretty bitten by history and English; I had a complete mental block about maths; when I first started studying physics I was absolutely fascinated by it as long as all I had to do was to ask questions; as soon as I was expected to work things out and realized that it was turning into maths I think I took physics as far as 'O' grade and then shed it; in later stages at school, on my own or through a friend at home actually, I discovered photography; I got very involved and started a photography club in school and we had a dark room, but that was my only active contribution to school extra-curricular life; on teachers, I have to say the art teacher certainly didn't inspire me; what I vividly remember was getting the belt; the belt was a big part of Scottish education, the tawse, which was applied to your hands, usually three strokes but the legal maximum was six, and if a strong male teacher administered six to a ten year old child I think they could have completely destroyed their hands; it was horrible and depended on the teachers how often it was applied; quite often they would teach with the belt out on the table as a visible threat; there were other very bad teachers who used it a lot and there were good teachers where the belt was never a presence in the class as it wasn't necessary; Jordanhill School was mixed and there was certainly no rule that it couldn't be applied to girls but I think the convention was that it wasn't; I can't remember a girl getting the belt; I probably got it about once a year on average, and it was something that happened less and less to me as I got older, and more and more to others; the reason I got the belt from the art teacher was because I started a self-portrait with the ears and not the eyes, and we had been told that we had to start with the eyes; I remember someone else getting the belt for painting the sky red because skies weren't red; he was extreme and in fact didn't use the regulation Lochgelly Tawse, as they were called, but used a length of rubber belt which was worse; the school playground had a wall with ridges and gaps, and when you were playing with a tennis ball (we were not allowed footballs in the playground) they often got stuck in the holes out of our reach; I was using the ridges to climb up to retrieve our ball just when the Deputy Head came round the corner; the worst thing about that sort of belting was that it wasn't done as part of a class on the spot but you were told to come back and see him at the end of the day

17:28:21 My father had a sabbatical year and we had a cottage down in Dumfrieshire, on the edge of the Ayrshire coalfields; he had decided that there he should write the book he was supposed to be writing (he continued doing so for the rest of his life) and I went to school in the town; the school only went up to fourth year so everyone left after their 'O' grades and if anyone wanted to go on they would go to Dumfries Academy; it wasn't an academic school but actually the teachers there were the ones I remember; they were very human; it was a small community so that everybody knew each other; the art teacher there was in his first year in teaching and fired up with zeal and suddenly had someone - I would have been fourteen-fifteen - who had a view to this being their life; he was a very good teacher and I only had him for that one year, then we returned to Glasgow and I went back to the same school again

19:34:13 My father, a son of the Vicarage, was very conventionally Church of England, and all our childhood we went to the local Scottish Episcopal Church; mother always stayed at home to make lunch and in retrospect it was very clear that she had no time for it; she was never an acknowledged atheist, but she was committed to the Labour Party and social reform, very anti-establishment really, and I'm sure that her rebellious attitude to the church did rub off on me; as we got older I think my father's faith disappeared and going to church became a social habit, then he stopped going at all; there was never any pressure on us; at fourteen I had a little experiment with evangelical Christianity; I joined the Scripture Union at school and we were all told that what we had to do was to look forward to being saved, and it was an automatic rite of passage; I can remember waiting and thinking when was it going to happen and it never did; it seemed like a long time at the time, but was possibly only a few months of interest; in fact my older sister at this stage became a complete born-again evangelical Christian, and took me along to a Plymouth Brethren Meeting House which I went back to a few times; looking back on it I think it was probably a period of six months to a year; from that point on I had a rather wishy-washy muddled notion that religiosity was something that was a part of us and I wanted to stay in touch with, but I think I've just never been a joiner and I drifted away from looking for it in any organized religion; but I hung onto all sorts of religious ideas and I think the aesthetics side of high church religion; when I was in late teens and first left home as a student I was very attracted to High-Church Anglicanism and Catholicism purely on aesthetic grounds, but by that stage I was aware that it was just an aesthetic appeal; from that point on I enjoyed going to a Christmas Service and it was a nostalgic cultural thing, but it was very hard to separate where just nostalgic or aesthetic pleasure or some kind of residual religious belief lay; it all became absolutely crystal clear over one summer - 1992 when I was thirty-seven; I think I was a victim of our education system because I had not taken to maths and physics and had taken to arts subjects, the ways had parted, and science and the whole scientific approach and scientific method as a way of looking at the world had just not been part of my life; at that point I read Stephen Hawking's 'Brief History of Time' - or I think like most people I read the first two chapters and then my head spun - but it was enough to open up a whole new way of approaching the world; I also read A.N. Wilson's biography of Christ which reduced the whole myth to a piece of historical research; the two books coming together and the point that I was at was a revelation and a sudden dropping off of all the baggage and the burden off my shoulder, and I felt free to see the world completely unburdened by all that; one of the things that interested me at the time was the way that it worked through everything and I suddenly thought of the ridiculousness of monarchy; I wondered why it was connected which is fairly logical when you work it through; when you remove taboo and custom from the world of belief and you have that freedom to see everything afresh, then all these sorts of things you somehow just take for granted are gone

26:40:19 I was academically interested and also absolutely clear in my mind at this point that I was going to be a painter; there were then five courses in Britain where universities and art colleges teamed up, as in the case of Edinburgh, and offered a joint course so you studied history of art at university and did a practical art course at college; I looked at them all and Edinburgh was the best, and the only one that was part of two well-established establishments in their own right; it was a five year course because you had to reach the same standard in both university and art college; that was a happy experience; there were some inspirational teachers on the university side; I went to the art college full of expectation and hope but since then have been a bit of a sceptic about how art colleges are run; looking back on it I think there were teachers who I could have got a lot more out of, but the way that it was run and my attitude, my non-joining rebelliousness, took over; but in the university studying the history of art the teaching was wonderful, and in those days we had the luxury of one to one tutorials; Martin Kemp was at St Andrews at the time and was my external examiner and the only time I met him was when he chaired my viva; of inspirational people I would pick out Duncan Macmillan who was a lecturer at the time and went on to the Chair of the department; there was another inspirational lecturer who never taught me personally, George Henderson, who came down here to Cambridge; he was a medievalist and by the stage that I made my Honours choices I chose that period, and unfortunately he had come to Cambridge by then

30:23:20 My social life was definitely curtailed in that when I went to Edinburgh I was in a relationship with a girlfriend and I had imagined that it would fizzle out; in fact she then came to Edinburgh because I was there so I got very caught up in that; looking back on it, to be fair on her, I willingly went into it, but it was definitely through pressure from her that we got married really young; socially that was a big block to taking full advantage of being a student in Edinburgh; after being students the marriage fell apart and I was single again; we did not have children; looking back on it the legal bit of paper was just a legal complication; lots of my friends had similar girlfriends through that same stage and then they just split up; I was twenty-three when I graduated; I was absolutely sure I wanted to be a practising artist; I was very disenamoured with the fine-art world; in a fairly loose sort of way I was politically motivated and saw my practice as an artist to be something that was important socially; in those days there wasn't such a thing as community art; because of the perspective I had had in my studies the kind of paradigm that I held up as an example to myself was the old Renaissance workshop where you took out all the pretension of the individual ego and the art had a social place and there was no confusion about why people were commissioning work; that was something I hankered for; then when I finished university where you can fash around wondering what on earth you are going to do; I discovered there was community art; at that time it was the beginning of the painting gable-end murals; that was the high-profile thing that caught my eye, but then I realized that all these people painting murals reflected the social things that went on behind it, and that totally caught my imagination; I started trying to get in on community art and there was an organization in Edinburgh called Theatre Workshop; I got involved with them in the first place because they did a children's Christmas show; a friend phoned me and asked if I was interested in some work painting sets; I went down thinking it was just a bit of bread and butter work, and a more pleasant way of making money than selling shoes, which is what I was doing; when I got there I realized that it was a community art centre; I got very involved and was a project worker there for the next three years; I would say that for me those were my learning, student, years; I was single and free so personally it was a more growing time than the arrested time before; this was 1978-81, which also coincided with the change of the political climate in Britain, with the beginning of the Thatcher years; at Theatre Workshop my role was described as visual arts project worker; I was working a lot with children and there is nothing more levelling than that - painting murals with children and adult community groups; because there was a lot of multi-arts activity in this team I was also getting involved in doing theatrical work, not performing myself but making props and stage sets for community shows; it was the kind of thing where really you took on whatever was thrown at you; it is that which laid the foundation for everything that I have done since; the director of that organization, Bob Palmer, was someone that I see as very significant in determining my life; he went on after that to work in the Scottish Arts Council, and then he was the Director of the Glasgow Year of Culture; the short time that he was at Theatre Workshop I think he was very good at recognising; I was a very quiet and retiring person, not obviously extrovert as so many people in that community art world were, but I think he picked me up and read me very quickly and fed me all sorts of opportunities which were the right ones for me at the time

38:20:16 At that stage I would definitely have referred to myself as a painter, and although I was doing all this multi-art stuff and doing mosaic work as that was a very nice medium to do with children, my sense of myself was that I was a painter; the transition was a very gradual thing; later, after I had left Theatre Workshop, which had headed more in the drama direction, three of us, with a lot of support from them, left and set up our own independent environmental art group; we were not charitably funded but worked as a freelance partnership so were always looking for other work around the bread and butter work that we got; around the middle of the '80s was the beginning of the heritage industry explosion in the wake of Jorvik and places like that; gradually I was drawn into that world, initially purely as a bread and butter thing, but found the museum world tied in with my interest in history; we started my doing two dimensional things; in fact what happened was that we got a job for the David Livingstone Birthplace, and they wanted to create an African village with David Livingstone sitting round his fire with Chief Sekeletu; we were making the village as a series of painted flats and somebody else was making three-dimensional historical figures; the designer who was commissioning us asked if we made figures; our response was to say no; then these figures arrived to be put in place in our set; we looked at them and said that next time we would make figures; they took us at our word, and in those days there was so much opportunity to stick your neck out; the Battle of Bannockburn site was being redeveloped and they wanted a whole series of historical figures; we were asked to make ten; so suddenly we were experimenting in modelling in clay, I taught myself to caste, book in one hand and materials in the other; I discovered that I really enjoyed working in three dimensions and gradually I shifted; at a certain point my wife, Sarah, noticed that I was filling in a form and had put down my occupation as a sculptor and I hadn't really thought about it

42:47:22 Of my work, one that I would immediately gravitate to was one done shortly after I went freelance with the two other artists; we set up a project in Leith, the dock area of Edinburgh, which at that stage was in terminal decline; the Government set up a regeneration agency - the Scottish Development Agency - and they picked out different areas of the country for economic redevelopment, and Leith was one of them; we went to the Leith Project funded by the SDA, and persuaded them that if they were putting all this money in then it was really important that they engaged the local community, and if they did, community art was a very good way of doing it; we managed to convince them to give us three years funding to do this; there had been a huge gable-end in quite a prominent spot in Leith, and every time I had passed it I had thought it was just the place for a mural; the culmination of our three-year project was that I got to do this gable-end mural; I got a group together of people aged from about twenty to seventy, all of whom had grown up and lived in Leith; we looked at all their experiences, and the mural is a kind of swan song of that gable-end movement; I was very excited by it at the time, and the reason I have come back to that one, although it bears very little relationship to my present work, is that it has taken on quite a life of its own, and I discovered later that the whole of Leith sees it as a symbol for themselves; I now get invited back once a year to give tours of it to festival-goers; so I'm very proud of that piece, not just because I think it was aesthetically successful, but I'm very proud of the life that's developed around it; it has developed its own independent existence

46:31:55 Another one as a balance to the painted image I did with Paul Grime; we got a commission in 1992 to do a series of relief sculpture panels for St James' railway station in Liverpool, as part of the Wirral Link underground station; it was certainly the biggest scale piece of work that we had done up to that point, and we did four large panels, two each; they were almost like everything we had ever wanted to do in any art work into one piece; they are fairly dense and busy but I am still very pleased with those; I think they marked a turning round with my redefining myself as a sculptor rather than a painter; sundials are something that popped up periodically all along; my first attempt at a sundial was as a school project; my wife, Sarah, was a teacher in an Edinburgh primary school; she got me involved in the school to come and do and art project as an after school club; we made a ground-level sundial in the playground which involved lots of clay models which had been done by the children, which I then took away and caste in a durable material, and we set them in the ground and created a sundial; at that point my interest was not at all technical; in fact there was a parent who was a mathematician who offered to produce all the plotting of the sundial; I did actually then do another sculpture which was based on sundialing, but again I didn't do any calculation; but they kept popping up thematically, and visually I love all the variations of forms of sundials; then I got a commission to do a sundial sculpture for St Andrews University; they were building a new museum and they had a lot of scientific instruments, and they wanted a sundial to use as an educational tool to explain how they worked, and the requirement was for an accurate sundial; I asked if there was someone who could provide all the calculations; they said they didn't think so, which given it was St Andrews University I suspect was not quite true; in fact I have met people since through the British Sundial Society who live in St Andrews who could have done so, but luckily I had to read up the technicalities of sundialing and realized it wasn't actually that tricky at all; once I had started doing my own calculations and understanding how they worked I then started realizing there was a huge potential in going way beyond the form of the sundial with the rod, and the sculptural possibilities were huge; that was really the start of my whole sundial thing which started in 2008, and in the following year I made the one for your garden; that was my first experimentation with a sphere sundial which I'd seen in illustration form; Thomas Jefferson had one at Monticello in his garden which was part of a meditative walk; it is a really interesting form because it is a sphere with the hours marked around the equator and a bracket which you move round to a point where in ceases to cast a shadow and then take a reading off the sphere; what I loved about that was that sphere sundials were just like miniature earth and you were replicating what was happening on a huge cosmic scale; I think this was the attraction to all sundials for me; you were making a sculpture with one tangible piece here but it was actually part of something huge; the other thing that appealed to me was that when you put sculpture out of doors you see it in different lights and times of day it is a completely different work; suddenly this thing that you think of as solid is actually a fleeting, shifting, changing thing; I think that was quite exciting; that is what drew me to using the sun, not just as a time-telling feature in sculpture but also something that actually changes the way you look at a piece of work

54:20:05 Sarah, if she was being fair to herself would tell you that I wouldn't do anything that I did if I couldn't take it back to her and run it past her; I should give her her dues as a muse, and always has been; she has always been incredibly supportive and encouraging when I'm feeling dejected about things, looking at pieces of work and on the point of scrapping them, she has always been there as a support; my sons, unlike me, are both mathematicians and scientists; I would like to think I played a part in them taking that route because it was that summer of revelation when I shed my superstition and discovered the scientific way of looking at the world was when they were small boys, and I think that probably informed my influence on them at that stage even if it was not an informed, educated science approach; when I was struggling in the early stages of getting on top of sundialing, my elder son, Matty, came and stepped in and taught me the basics of trig.; then when he found me plotting a sundial which involved plotting the solstice and equinox lines and the instructions I got to do it were all done graphically, he looked and said it was appallingly inaccurate and that I should be doing it by trig. and calculation; I asked him how to do it and showed him the book I was following; he took it away and came back later with a little computer program where all you had to do was to put in the height of the gnomon, the exact time you were trying to plot, and it would tell you the exact angle and length of the shadow that this gnomon would cast; so his little bit of computer programming has been a bedrock of my plotting sundials since

57:52:20 When I heard about the project in Cambridge it sounded really intriguing but I wasn't quite sure what would be involved; I knew there was a stone in Cambridge commemorating a Chinese poet, which featured lines from a poem on it; at first I saw that it was going to be purely a technical exercise in casting this stone and reproducing it so it could be incorporated in another garden, but after immersion in the project for a couple of days it is opening up as a really exciting possibility; it is a Chinese-British friendship garden and it is all based on the work of this poet and the stone is the central piece; I use text and letter-cutting a lot in my work and something that I'm very keen on is the idea of the meditative symbolic walk and paths, and central to this design which is being designed by the head gardener at King's College, Steven Coghill, is a path winding its way through the centre which will feature text on it; that was the first thing that pulled me in as an interesting aspect of it; the juxtaposition of European text and Eastern text is something I think is going to be really interesting; in fact having looked at the Chinese calligraphy it is such a culturally different world for me, and because I know the subtleties of European text I am very aware and tentative about my involvement with the Chinese text; the whole world of Chinese calligraphy I think is absolutely fascinating and I am really looking forward to working with Chinese calligraphers and blending it with my own letter-cutting and sculptural work