Profiles

Chalk Works, Edinburgh: Sculpture and Sun Dials by Tim Chalk

Trading under the name of CHALK WORKS, Tim Chalk works from his studio in Edinburgh’s “village in the City”, the historic Duddingston Village, situated under Arthur’s Seat, with one foot in Holyrood Park, next to Duddingston Loch.

Tim has been producing artworks for public and private situations for over 25 years and has a wealth of experience of projects of all scales and situations. He has had work placed in various significant public buildings throughout the country, including the National Library of Scotland, the National Museum of Scotland and James Street Station in Liverpool.

Regardless of context, the works are all characterised by one unifiying feature; they are all site specific and designed to relate closely to their environments and the poeple who live with them. Stemming from Tim Chalk’s beginnings in community art, this concern for the physical and social context of his work is at the core of his practice.

The newly completed Riverside Museum of Transport in Glasgow features two lifesize cast concrete horses designed to complement the architecture of Zaha Hadid, and a series of cast concrete relief panels depicting local flora and fauna, built into the surrounding landscaping. The technical challenge of the concrete casting was the requirement to match the horses in both colour and finish to the polished concrete floor of the museum interior. The polished finish has a strong aesthetic appeal from the outset, and as the horses fast become a favourite feature of the museum and with the heavy handling this entails, the surface patina of the concrete will only improve with time.
 

Recently he was commissioned by the National Trust for Scotland to make a series of four linked exterior and interior sculptural features for the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. The works incorporate an intriguing element of puzzle for visitos to unravel. As Burns drew inspiration for his poetry from the land, Scots words are ploughed from the earth. On the approach to the Museum a bronze crow picks through steel words as they emerge from sculpted furrows, while another crow seizes a word and flies off towards the next work; another crow and more steel and stone carved words mounted on the wall by the main entrance. On a path that takes the visitor into the building and through the main concourse, a series of words hanging in the air continue the trail, which culminates in a sundial based sculpture in the Museum Garden.
 

Earlier this year Tim Chalk completed a public sculpture commissioned by West Lothian Council for Linlithgow’s West Port. At the centre of this work is a two metre tall bronze sculpture of a girl resting beneath a tree. The figure represents a locally celebrated cattle drover known as Katie Wearie. This striking work serves as a sculpture, a landscaped seating area and a giant sundial. The shadow of the bird perching in the branches of the tree courses round the hour marks set in the ground in granite, reminding us of how the passage of time has created the history of the town. Combined with a sculptural bench with a narrative inscription, this work provides a visual focus for its location as well as an expression of local identity in the telling of a well loved local story. The base for the sculpture carries an inscribed tex taken from a song specially written for the project by a local musician.

Tim Chalk’s long standing interest is Sundials and Sun sculptures has recently been fed by several commissions which have allowed him to develop this theme. Sun Sculptures and Sundials strike a special chord with people. A sculpture that interacts with the natural environment in a calculated way becomes part of something much greater than itself, and the combination of sculpture and function gives sundials an added significance appropriate to many situations. The scope for personalising both the subject matter and the marking of significant dates also adds to their appeal. An example of this is the piece titled “Sunkissed”; two figures positioned so that their shadows meet and kiss at an appointed day and hour every year. Tim Chalk’s experimentation with the visual possibilities of the sundial has resulted in the development of an equitorial sundial design incorporating etched glass, which allows for easy reading in northern latitudes. Tim Chalk’s sundials have been commissioned by Museums, schools and private individuals, as educational tools, commemorative features or just plain visual enhancement.

A range of work by Chalk Works can be seen at www.chalkworks.com