Tim Braden:
Crossing Rivers and Climbing Mountains 2007

Shortly before going on a trip to Brazil, his first to South America, Braden read a story in The New Yorker that persuaded him to note his imagined impressions of the country before actually going.

David Grann’s article told the story of the Englishman, Colonel Fawcett, an adventurer who disappeared with his son in the Brazilian rainforest in 1925. Grann re-traces the many expeditions mounted by various teams from Britain, France, America and Brazil, in search of Fawcett over a period of 70 years. As he travels further and further into the forest, Grann succumbs to feelings of his own intrepidness, the ‘no-one else has seen this before’ boastfulness. It isn’t until the writer’s encounter with a bemused ancient woman who recalls many of the previous expeditions crashing their way past her village for half a century that the story turns inside out:

‘She stared at me, her narrow eyes widening. “What is it that these white people did?” she asked. “Why is so important for their tribe to find them?”’

As in the story, in the exhibition Crossing rivers and climbing mountains, the explorers themselves become the strange tribe we try to understand. Tim Braden’s appropriationist paintings of paintings, and objects (sculptures) of objects, come together to explore the psychological impulse to explore.

Maurice Godelier, is a series of six watercolours and a film Braden downloaded from the Internet: ‘to find the baruya story’ (1968 and 1984). The film shows the French anthropologist Maurice Godelier living with the Baruya tribe in New Guinea while conducting a field study about their customs. The paintings portray the moments in which Maurice Godelier himself appears as the subject on camera.

In Buccaneers Braden repaints an illustration from a cover of a book he found in Brasil; using it to look into the intimate connection between the History of expeditions and popular boy’s adventure stories of the 1950s. For Braden, books in an unknown language become simply ‘things’, physical objects, pushing all the meaning onto the cover illustrations. Although intended as a clue to the content, these fall into genre from where Braden tries to recover and examine how they might have influenced our ideas of faraway places.

As a memoir of what the imagination of the jungle is built on, Buccaneers hangs facing Expedition, a large painting depicting the last moments of Fawcett and his men, clutching their dogs, starving, lost in the real jungle.

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Crossing rivers and climbing mountains (Anthropologist), 2006, oil on board, 36.5 x 42.2 cm, (A00116)

Crossing rivers and climbing mountains (Maurice Godelier) 2006 Six drawings; watercolour on paper, wooden display unit, glass - accompanied by the DVD ‘to find the Baruya story’ 1969/1982 Each drawing: 28 x 38.3 cm; total 50 x 281 x 42 cm (A00117)

Crossing rivers and climbing mountains (Trunk) 2006, Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm, (A00119)

Installation view Crossing Rivers and Climbing Mountains, ARQUEBUSE, Geneva, 2007

Detail of 'River Boat' 2006

Crossing rivers and climbing mountains (Woman with feathered hat) 2006 Acrylic and gouache on illustrator’s card 66 x 50 cm (A00124)

Installation view 'Crossing Rivers and Climbing Mountains', ARQUEBUSE, Geneva, 2007

Detail of 'River Boat' Installation including: watercolour on paper; poster on wall; acrylic on board; wood, paint, boat sail, and mixed media 2006

Tim Braden: Crossing Rivers and Climbing Mountains 2007

Tim Braden:
Crossing Rivers and Climbing Mountains 2007