Provenance

/ˈprɒv(ə)nəns/ Noun

Touchlight Genetics residency 2021

Tim Fowler’s residency at the Victorian pumping station in Hampton, London, now home to Touchlight, a biotech company responsible for the invention of synthetic DNA, raises questions concerning greatness?

Whether some one is born with certain qualities or whether they are accumulated with time and experience, is one of the oldest debates. Surely greatness is in many of us but very few of us have both the luck and absolute application, that it takes, for it not to be lost or squandered. It is not simply good enough to be born to something, you must also then work at it.

Greatness in art, is a concept first suggested by Giorgio Vasari in his series of artist biographies “The Lives” (1550). Leonardo Da Vinci was one of “The Lives”. Da Vinci, a polymath, would have been at home in the buildings and Laboratories of Touchlight, a company changing the world, at least by making it possible for others, to create that necessary, positive change.

Tim Fowler is working to capture the meaning of change by asking the more metaphysical questions of who we are and how we came to be, here. Asking us to look beyond how we perceive ourselves, to think bigger, to be bigger.