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b. 1973, Manchester, UK
education:
2000 Chelsea College of Art
1999 Manchester Metropolitan University
"I was pretty nervous about the Hole Editions experience at first as since 2000 I have used solely Bic biro for my works on paper. In the true spirit of a collaboration though I was up for Lee advising me on the process in reference to the kinds of marks I usually make with my trusty Bic. I found the stones themselves very seductive, like I was tackling with the life and memory of something that looks and feels both harsh and primordial and smooth and contemporary.
I had one motif in my head that I wanted to do a print of, a good image to start with, to get me used to the materials a little bit. ‘At the edge’ could be an edge, the edge of a cliff (a suicide maybe or just larking about maybe jumping a bike off it), it could just be the edge of the stone or paper too. I knew that after I produced the first print I wanted to introduce some text, the tag lines in my work evoke both innocent reminiscences as well as suggesting darker reportage. I wanted the text in ‘Over The Edge’ to look like it had been cut out or fallen from the page, disrupted by the drawn marks.
All my recent drawings seem to have a dual perspective, they could be both fragments of a city or remains of stuff pressed into the earth. With the third stone ‘Do Yourself A Favor’ I started by drawing a vague ‘bargain’ star shape that you used to see in illuminated in bargain supermarkets like Kwik Save where my sister worked for years. I remember that she was once involved in a robbery where all the staff had to get down on the floor with hands behind back, she was well shaken as you can imagine.
The planimetric viewpoint, especially in ‘The Receivers’ and ‘Suspect Device’ of the works is an instinctive way of drawing and mapping out my memories. These memories relate to incidents that are possibly exaggerated, like urban myths, and thinking about these details allows me to think more about the anecdotes themselves and naturally exaggerate elements in the drawing, rather than how I was drawing them, more akin to mapping out these places. I’ve always been interested in this viewpoint and referenced the way elements of the drawings were embellished later on from books on mapping, especially reading about the Hereford Mappa Mundi and the maps ability to prioritize geographical elements both politically and socially." Simon Woolham, March 2011
Website > Simon Woolham
Click on thumbnails for larger images.
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