The Museum of Clunky Objects – https://timdoddsartist.com/

Enter The Museum of Clunky Objects HERE

The Museum of Clunky Objects was open on 8th November 2025. It is now presented as an online exhibition.

Tim Dodds invited John Brown to join him in creating The Museum of Clunky Objects in his studio. The exhibition inhabits and engages the former office space in different ways, making use of the fittings, pillars, walls, and windows (and views from them) to present sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing. The ‘studio exhibition’ is an intermediary proposition, hovering on the threshold of artistic conception and realisation, where the act of making meets the act of viewing. It allows the processes and experimentation, including the in-between stages, the difficulties, challenges, or the ‘clunkiness’ of making art and the emergence of new possibilities to be revealed.

In the exhibition, the artists consider the different ways this ‘clunkiness’ plays a part in the creation of their artwork. This can be as a strategy deployed in works that creates contrast in the visual language or as an unavoidable result of making. Through their creative processes of photography, drawing, model making, brushwork and composition, the clunkiness is transformed, finding new expressions, and meaning in their rendered forms.

John Brown is an Edinburgh-based artist and teacher who uses a wide range of sources, methods, and formats to make large, complex installations that place small multiple scenarios and objects against a backdrop of the epic to create new narratives. At the core of all his work, there is an obsession with drawing, painting, model-making, and an interest in the heart-breaking amount of imagery and stuff that the world contains at this point in history. Recent work has explored the idea of the ‘unrealised project’ as a way of investigating large-scale or potentially impossible undertakings through small-scale proposal drawings, paintings, and models.

John was born in Dumfries in the southwest of Scotland and received an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art in 1991. He returned there to teach and now works with students from all year groups. He has taught and lectured in art colleges around the world including Kansas State University (USA), Kyoto Seika (Japan) and SMFA Boston (USA). He has won various awards for his work including the William Littlejohn Award, Lyon and Turnbull Award for painting, Royal Scottish Academy Award, John Gray award and the Ucross Foundation residency award.

Tim Dodds is an Edinburgh based artist. He constructs makeshift models out of different things such as card, clay, foam, found items, and painting materials, including discarded canvases and surplus oil paint scraped from his palette. In his work he explores ideas of connection, inner and outer, as he tries to find his way into the essence and act of drawing and painting. His distinctive approach, involving humour and playfulness, uses the medium as a language, as if it were to become an unpredictable structure for thinking and world-making.

Tim studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1998-2002) and Edinburgh College of Art (2012-14). He has exhibited in solo exhibitions at Wasps (Patriothall, Edinburgh), GENERATORprojects, Dundee and 36 Limestreet, Newcastle and group exhibitions including, ‘At Cross Purposes’, Oriel Môn, Wales, ‘Thomas Aitchison/Tim Dodds: Paintings’ at Mote 102, Edinburgh the Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy; The Fleming Collection, London; Spot Korin, Kyoto; and Rhubaba, Edinburgh. His work belongs in the Royal Scottish Academy collection and has been written about in several publications, including Apollo Magazine: ‘Models and Materialities’ and ‘At Cross Purposes’, published by Aberystwyth University School of Art. He is a contributor to 1SSUE59 with 19 other artists which is housed in the Bodleian Library. He has received many awards including, most recently, funding from Creative Scotland’s Open Fund to develop and exhibit work, 2023-2025.