Simeon Nelson

Faculty Member, School of Art and Design

Professor of Sculpture

About

Simeon Nelson is an award winning sculptor, installation and interdisciplinary artist who works within the museum and in the public domain. His gallery based work and interventions into urban sites are concerned with revealing and mapping the hidden systems and significations of the site.

After establishing himself as an artist in Australia and Asia in the 1990s, he moved to London in 2001 and is currently working on projects in Asia, Australia, Europe and the UK. He was a Finalist in the National Gallery of Australia’s National Sculpture Prize in 2005 and a Finalist in the 2003 Jerwood Sculpture Prize. Passages, a monograph on his work was published by The University of New South Wales Press, Sydney in 2000.
He has received numerous awards including seven arts council grants in Australia and the UK, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship in 2000 and a Leverhulme Trust grant in 2007. In 1997 he was the Australian representative to the IX Triennial India, New Delhi.

Recent projects include Cryptosphere, artist residency and solo exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society, London, Desiring Machine, a monumental sculpture on the outskirts of Melbourne; Cactal, a sculptural intervention into the facade of the University of Teesside, UK; Proximities, in collaboration with sound artists Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and Flume, a large-scale site-embedded commission for Ashford, Kent, UK. His work is held in public and private collections including the Art/Omi Foundation, New York, the Jerwood Foundation, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Cass Sculpture Foundation, UK, and Goldman Sachs.

He is Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hertfordshire, a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and an associate of the Royal British Society of Sculptors.

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Research Statement

I sometimes work collaboratively with other artists, architects,
landscape architects, structural engineers, composers, geographers, historians, biologists, dancers and others. I am interested in the potential of shared languages, underlying aesthetics and concerns that occur within and between different art-forms.
Mapping, ornament and other languages of systematic representation are a focus of my practice. Inﬂuences include Robert Smithson’s deconstruction of the language of mapping and Eva Hesse’s exposures of underlying systems of meaning and power within society and the natural world. My sculptural language transposes between the graphical and the spatial using the tropes of cartography, ethnographic ornament and scientiﬁc illustration. The resulting work is as much a map or model of itself as of its referent.

I use analogies and metaphors from science, philosophy and theology. Topology, the study of the properties of form that remain invariant under distortion, entropy, the tendency for energy and organization to dissipate and homeostasis or autopoesis, the ability of a system, organism or machine to maintain a steady state internally in an entropic environment would be three of the more signiﬁcant scientiﬁc ones. This engagement with science is motivated by a ‘post-reductionist’ sense of the necessity for science to connect with other forms of knowledge and ways of knowing the world.

I sift patterns and fragments from the natural and cultural realms and recombine them. These patterns could be derived from the connective tissue of the city, for example a motor-way, a railway network or a street pattern. Equally they could be derived the branching of a tree, the migratory route of birds, a river drainage basin or a vascular network. I see the city as much an organism as an animal or plant and as much an ecosystem as a rainforest.* My work is derived from the language of depiction as much from what is depicted. Representations from cartography, biology, anatomy, cosmology and ethnographic, architectural, historical ornament form a great part of my raw material.

The technique of isolating of an element; removing it from its context allows the combining of fragments from different systems and is part of an ongoing practice of what I call 'relational or recombinant taxonomy. This bringing together of disparate structures, rescaled and recontextualised into the same artwork is a search for underlying similarities not immediately apparent. It is motivated by an intuition that under the diversity and complexity of things there are sets of relationships that if followed far enough ultimately connect to the same source.

*My use of the 'ecosystem' in multiple contexts is indebted to Felix Guattari's essay, "The Three Ecologies" in which he expands the notion of ecology to include
the mental and the social as well as the environmental.
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Teaching
My research practice and my teaching are close-knit, offering to students a model of cross-disciplinary practice and research that will provide them with the necessary tools to make professional choices that maximizes their potential as artists.
I do this by teaching a mode of ‘praxis’ to students whereby the private theoetical/critical/creative concerns of the artist are seen as continuous with more practical and professional knowledge. All aspects of an artists creativity and expertise are seen as requisite for making ones way in the various platforms for practice whether museum, gallery, urban space or any other site of potential artistic production or intervention.