Tim Silver has previously made cars, trucks, skateboards, guitars, even a life-size motor-scooter, out of crushed, reconstituted crayon. There was a purposeful confusion between the meanings associated with form and content in these works. In being driven, a car was also a crayon being drawn, and what was drawn were tyre marks as much as a kind of writing or drawing. All the objects were carefully chosen to render these multiple cadences at the threshold between drawing and sculpture, text and image, between reading and looking, such that they seemed to flicker in our consciousness, alternately one thing then another, a conundrum.

Literally the meaning was fluid, the liquefying of materials transformed these associations as it did the shape. Picture the artist melting crayon - an alchemist - pouring the fluid into various empty moulds. It solidified and was then used to draw. It was perhaps neither drawing or sculpture, really, but simply melting and pouring, a transformative process that passed from solid to liquid to solid states, and from one form to another (the 'object' and the 'picture' being merely two of the familiar forms of art). Silver also worked with other materials including rubber, cheese, jaffas, fairy floss, and chocolate. Many of these works have putrefied, broken, been eaten, or turned to dust soon after their exhibition. The artist's decision then (like the alchemist's) is at what point to arrest the process, and to what effect.

In two new works for this exhibition that fulcrum moment has changed again since the new objects are not just partially spent, but obliterated completely; they have dissipated in the continuing process set in train by the artist. In Burning Up, the half-metre model of a stealth bomber made out of match-heads has exploded and been incinerated. A lenticular photograph simultaneously renders the moments before and after its explosion. In Drift, a row-boat made of watercolour pigment is gradually dissolved in water over a period of days. Photographed at various stages of dissolution, these images are changed every few days of the show, thereby calibrating the time-frames for making the work with its exhibition.

Both these objects are now totally consumed by their analogies, overtaken by their symbolic associations. From which follow obvious points about the futility of war and the obsolescence of landscape painting. Precisely, the small boat - often a subject of the watercolourist - does not float but sinks in its medium, and by some stretch of the imagination we might call that final cloudy suspension a painting, at the very least we would agree, that painting is in some sense undone. The model balsa plane, rough hewn and hand-made, yet representing very recent military technology, combines its form and function in a useless, self destructive flight, and that's the brief kinetic duration framed by the artist, the complete annihilation of the model (of sculpture).

The audience is left with photographs and some video documenting this 'dramatic entropy', which seems to chart the artist's even further remove from sculpture and drawing, toward a photographic instant in which a material transition is captured. Silver has also remade the objects and set them alongside the documentation, which suggests the destruction of the objects is implicit in their origin, emphasising the elliptical process in which form, substance and consequence are drawn from the inchoate. From which the work's ultimate significance might derive irrespective of materials. Evidently, Silver now seems more interested in things losing shape rather than taking on new shapes, rendering them in the few moments they are nearest to formlessness, in-between form and content, immaterial and without beginning or end.

[Written by Stuart Koop, 2004. Except from Tim Silver exhibition catalogue]

Colour photograph of a boat sculpture, afloat. Digital print on archival paper. Part of a series of 10 photographs. Edition 6/10, set 1/3.