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Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2020 Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures — language, ideology, and economy.

Violence. Silence. (2013)
16mm film transferred to HD video, 4’40” 

Vocals: Mhari McMullan and Hannes Hellström
Eyeball: Jack McConville
BSL: Sophie Mackfall
Drums: Colin Kearney
Special thanks to: Chris Nelms, Jody Henderson, Rebecca Wilcox, James Bell, and everyone at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh.

"Tom Varley's new film work entitled Violence. Silence. continues his exploration into the relationship between abstraction and language. Tom is influenced by constrained writing techniques, and the film he created playfully explored the associative and poetic possibilities of language. The work also emphasised the fact that linguistic meaning amounts to an evolving consensus over the significance of essentially meaningless bits of information - abstract sounds and signs.

The film’s structure is based on audio recordings of medical examinations with patients suffering from receptive aphasia; a neurological impairment characterised by superficially fluent, grammatical speech but with an inability to use or understand more than the most basic nouns and verbs. The film's title refers to the 1981 work Violins, Violence, Silence by American artist Bruce Nauman."

Collective Gallery Website

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