By Chloe Borich

For Tim Silver, harmony is found within transient moments of disorder. He makes work by engaging in intuitive play with temperamental materials that challenge and contradict the human form, usually leading to unexpected yet imaginative outcomes. For can I, just wait here with you (2022), it was an instance of chaos that prompted a return to control. What began as an assortment of individually cast body parts was patiently translated into a sculpture representing the human form. A body obliterated was to become a body resolved.

The late Phyllida Barlow once said that “…the role of the artist is to be able to present their own interpretation and their own personal response to the world around, which might be, as it is in my case, a very small world… it’s a small experience in comparison to so much else.” The minutiae of the everyday similarly intrigue Silver, who through his corporeal sculptures makes seemingly ordinary moments feel expansive and meaningful, even everlasting.

It was a friend’s photo posted on Instagram in August 2020—hands caressing against crumpled white bed sheets, drenched in morning light—that would be the catalyst for the artist to explore the nuances of human connection. Three years on, this symbol of tenderness remains compelling and relevant to Silver’s work. can I, just wait here with you depicts two men embracing: their naked forms are clasped together, arms are wrapped around each other, chins nestled into respective shoulders, eyes are closed. Cast from human bodies, the figures represent vulnerability suspended in time. Their gentleness creates a conduit for empathy, transmitted through lingering touch.

This palpable sense of calm embodied by the final work conceals an active state of production reliant on laborious processes and attention to detail. Faint seams of a cast that once existed leave a trace of the hours Silver spent moulding the forms of two people, who were first covered in vibrant layers of blue and green Body Double, then plaster coated bandages. Another series of casts followed, outer shells materialised, copper infused Forton MG was poured and set. Once the bodies emerged, a patina was drawn out across the work’s milky skin by enveloping the entire sculpture in pieces of fabric soaked in salty water, embalming their limbs, torsos and heads to activate the waiting copper particles infused within the Forton MG. Almost turquoise at first, once dried, the work’s blue hue developed and softened, textural creases and crevasses more discernible than before.

The power of can I, just wait here with you rests in Silver’s ability to immortalise the raw and vital emotion of a fleeting encounter. These bodies will never part one another: heads touching, arms looped, chests pressed firm, legs grazing; the boundaries of their forms blurring together as one. Through seeking out connectivity, the work illuminates the potent moments of intimacy that take place in the quiet of our everyday. Perhaps we don’t realise how intrinsic they truly are until they stand before us, in eternal embrace.