Tim Shaw RA FRSS

Born in Belfast, sculptor Tim Shaw studied at Manchester Polytechnic in 1984 and Falmouth School of Art from 1985 to 1989 and has since worked across a wide range of mediums, including immersive installation, robotics, film, performance, cast, and beaten metal. His public commissions include The Rites of Dionysus for the Eden Project, The Minotaur for The Royal Opera House, and The Drummer in Truro City Centre. His work frequently responds to issues of war and conflict. In 2007, Shaw received the Kenneth Armitage Fellowship Award, which allowed him to reside and work in Armitage’s former studio in London for two and a half years. There, Shaw created the first version of Man on Fire and first showed Casting a Dark Democracy, which was described by the Financial Times as "one of too few works to engage with the reality and human cost of the Iraq War."

In 2008, he was awarded the selector’s choice Threadneedle Prize for his piece Tank on Fire, which also relates to the Iraq War. Shaw was elected an Academician of the Royal Academy in 2013 and was also made a Fellow of The Royal British Society of Sculptors and Falmouth University in the same year.In 2014, he was invited to take up residence at the Kappatos Gallery, Athens, where Mother, The Air is Blue, The Air is Dangerous was conceived and created: an immersive installation shaped by childhood memories of Bloody Friday. In 2015, he received a Georg Schimmel Fellowship Award to work as a resident artist for one year at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg for Advanced Study in the Humanities of Law as Culture, Bonn, Germany. It was there that he created a robotic artwork entitled The Birth of Breakdown Clown, which examines humanity’s increasing reliance on AI and robotics.

In 2018, the San Diego Museum of Art held a major solo show of Shaw’s work entitled Beyond Reason, spanning a 30-year career. In 2021, Shaw responded to a much-publicised curse that the artists Gilbert and George issued to the "Royal Academy and all its members" by constructing a votive figure and ritually burning it in a field. Film documentation of the burning accompanies Peter Gabriel’s performance of The Court on his worldwide i/o tour. Man on Fire was finally cast in bronze at Castle Fine Art Foundry between 2021 and 2023, and in 2023, it was unveiled outside the Imperial War Museum North. Man on Fire has been recently shortlisted in for the 2024 PSSA Marsh Awards for Excellence in Public Sculpture.