Penny Simons
I find bodies a never-ending source of interest: the mystery of how they work internally- how everything fits and balances and how that active balance is necessary for life; how they work externally- how they move through spaces, accumulate information, interact with other people and things.
Then there’s the life of the mind; memory, imagination. I’m particularly interested in the interaction between the visual and the experiential- in other words, how to ‘translate’ a lived experience in a way that amalgamates traditional pictorial means and intuitive response.
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The work I produce, guided by this, is varied, and so are the media I use. There is no one approach: I pick things up, objects and ideas, and try them out. I like to put disparate things together to see what happens. Recently I’ve been using stitch as a way of drawing and as a result of my personal history, together with paper paint ink and fabric. Stitch holds together sometimes strongly but also in a more tentative way. It can join, allow things to hang together, but it can also show strain.
I think the common thread (!) running through the work is a sense of revealing something already there.
My images appear through layers of working and paring back. They are hidden, revealed, hidden again. They refer to time, and to accumulation. This can give the work its density, an accumulation (of marks or paint or fabric or whatever) which act as a sort of bedrock and from which the images emerge. And to paraphrase Laurie Anderson - "our body is a book, we just have to learn to read it"