By Chance I Did Rove

Timothy Sawyer Shepard

The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout

Aldeburgh Suffolk

Monday 19th to Monday 26th May 2025

From May 19th to the 26th, over the bank holiday weekend, artist Timothy Sawyer Shepard will be occupying The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, a historic landmark on the North Sea coast. During this time, he will work on new projects and welcome visitors to a two-part solo exhibition.

Part 1: On the ground floor. boathouse gallery space - Landscapes of Pyschogeographic Wanderings

Shepard has recently created twelve prints on handmade washi paper of various landscapes he has wandered. Drawing inspiration from Japanese Ukiyo-e landscape artists like Utagawa Hiroshige (subject of a major exhibition at The British Museum opening May 1) and Hokusai, Shepard embraces a practice that captures a multi-perspective experience gained from wandering freely without a specific purpose. This approach allows him to merge conscious and unconscious sensitivities, resulting in works that are not strict representations of a place but rather evocations of the experience.

Wandering the Sailors’ Path between Snape Maltings and Aldeburgh, Suffolk -

In the footsteps of Benjamin Britten

280 meters down an asbestos mine in Kazakhstan

Shepard walks with a camera, using it to document the various elements that combine to create what one sees of a place. He captures quick shots of whatever draws his eye. Later, many hundreds of these photographed elements are carefully cut out in Photoshop and meticulously recombined and re-contextualised to create a multi-temporal and multi-faceted singular image that expresses the memory of his wandering - a re-arranging of actuality with artistry, cultural resonance, impressions, perceptions, and imagination. He refers to this as an ‘omni-jective’ plural view of memory.

Wandering around the Royal Botanic Garden in the autumn, Kew, London

Shepard has been working with Japanese master printer Mitsuhiro Matsudaira of Atelier Matsudaira in Tokyo to make the prints for this exhibition. They used dai ōban-sized sheets (30.5 x 42 cm) of Japanese washi, made by the ninth-generation artisan and Ningen Kokuhō ("Living National Treasure”), Ichibei Iwano. The Iwano dynasty’s washi has been valued by Japanese artists for centuries and was used by notable Ukiyo-e landscape artists of the Edo era, such as Hiroshige and Hokusai. Aside from a limited supply made available to the Louvre for their restoration work, it is nearly impossible to obtain Iwano washi outside of Japan, where there is typically a waiting list of about a year before some sheets can be purchased.

Visitors to The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout are usually out for a good walk. The artist aims for this exhibition to inspire visitors to reflect on and experience a creative harmony of their inner and outer selves during their wanderings. The goal is for their walk to become an artistic expression - a source of material to be drawn together as a landscape of memory within which to dream.

Part 2. In the top room of The Lookout

Meeting a global community passing through the top room at

the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout. A sculpture in space and time

A fifth floor apartment in Leiden, Netherlands

When one falls asleep, having gathered the material of the day, one tears it up and recombines it, and dreams by one’s own light. In doing so, one becomes Creator.

The Upanishads.

Wandering around Place Vendôme Paris

Wandering around the neighbourhood of St George-in-the-East Church, London

The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout

Visitors can experience the top room of the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, where Shepard will present an installation from updated research and newly created images from his project, The Lookout Line. This project was initially developed for a series of events at the Lookout focused on “Exploring Our Peace" for World Peace Day.

It began with the artist standing in this small room, gazing eastward over the North Sea and imagining a line extending from his view all around the Earth. He contemplated who else might be out there at eye level with him, 15 meters above sea level. Shepard envisioned a society characterised by the unique connection between himself and others positioned along this shared path, which lies at latitude 52° 09' 02.05” N and 15 meters in elevation. This community, unknown to itself, is profoundly aligned—a procession as the Earth rotates through space.

The Lookout Line Latitude - 52° 09’02.05”N at an Elevation of 15m above sea level

Shepard wondered: what if the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, with him inside, could become completely stationary in space for a solar day whilst the Earth continued to spin? Anyone in line, going about their lives, would be travelling a path through the same field of space towards his point of stillness, arriving one after the other to where he stood. There, they could meet, in a fleeting moment of coming together, eye to eye, in that small room.

Using Google Earth, Shepard carefully followed the latitude of 52° 09’02.05"N to search out places 15m above sea level where human activity could be encountered. In the end, he discovered 30 such places. With photographs of these locations, he was able to accurately orient the Lookout in situ as it would be if perfectly still as the Earth rotates.

A carousel at a zoo in Amersfoort, Netherlands

The upper floor of a stablehand’s cottage on the Hook Peninsular in Ireland

About the Artist

Timothy Sawyer Shepard is an American artist and creative nomad, wandering and wondering through life with no conscious plan or design. He works with various media, including collage, photography, cine film, installation, and music composition.

Raised between the US and the UK, he studied Fine Art and Theology at Columbia and Georgetown Universities in the USA after attending Eton College.

He is interested in the human experience of perception, memory, and consciousness, and considers collage a metaphor for these concepts. He has served as a guest tutor at St Martin’s School of Art and a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art. He was a studio assistant to the late Michael Kidner, RA.

Shepard was the inaugural recipient of the Francis Carnwath Prize, named after the deputy director of the Tate Gallery and Chairman of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

He has created album artwork and music videos for various musicians, including Paul Weller and Kevin Ayers, for whom he also co-produced the album The Unfairground. Recently, he played a significant role as a Creative Consulting Producer on the documentary feature film Becoming Led Zeppelin.

Shepard is based in Notting Hill, London and Sendagaya, Tokyo, Japan.

Shepard live projecting his multiscreen film and audio collage

Look At Me under the Westway, in Portobello, Notting Hill