Simeon Nelson
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Simeon Nelson (born 1964) is an Australian sculptor and transdisciplinary artist.
Nelson was born in England in 1964 and came to Australia in 1967. Since 2001 he has lived and worked in London. He is Reader in Sculpture at The University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK and a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.
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[edit] Accomplishments
Simeon Nelson obtained a Bachelor of Fine Art degree at the Sydney College of the Arts in 1987. Nelson has exhibited extensively since 1986, his most recent solo exhibitions being Mappa Mundi, University of Hertfordshire Galleries, Hatfield, UK and Terroir/Boudoir, Elastic Residence, London, UK (2005). He is currently inaugural artist-in-residence at the Royal Geographical Society, London and n Spring 2008 he will have his first major London solo exhibition at the RGS exhibition space on Exhibition Road, London
His work has been selected for major national and international exhibitions, including the National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Prize, Canberra 2005; The Jerwood Sculpture Prize, London, 2003; Tempered Ground, Museum of Garden History, London (2004); This was the future: Australian Sculpture of the 1950s, 60s 70s and Today, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2003); Australian Perspecta; Between Art and Nature, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney (1997); Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia, Hakone Museum, Tokyo, Japan and touring (1996-97).
In 1997 he was the Australian representative to the IX Triennial India, New Delhi. Nelson was awarded the Australia Council’s New Work Project Grant in 1997, 1998 and 2003, the Australia Council Studio Residency in New York in 1994 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2000.
He has worked on some major public art projects including "Flume", Ashford Kent, UK, "Proximities:Local histories / Global entanglements", a key public art project commissioned to celebrate the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games; Chifley Square Commission, Sydney 1997; The M4 Freeway Commission, Sydney 2000 and the Progettomoderno Commission, Treviso, Italy, 2002.
He is currently working on major projects in China, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Britain.
[edit] Specific projects
His work looks at relationships between nature and technology; how nature is mediated by technology and science on one hand and art on the other.
Nelson has deployed a huge range of materials, techniques and ideas in his oeuvre. Much of his work looks at the forms, systems and structures of nature, as described and represented by science. The branching of a tree, the root directory of a website or the infinitely intricate tracery of the lungs or vascular system of the human body form a set of important metaphors in his work. They are seen as structurally and conceptually analogous.
[edit] Ornamental minimalism
His current project, loosely titled Ornamental Minimalism [1] articulates an interest in the representation of organic form in art and science. This body of work looks at human attempts to define and order nature, and how our position in relation to the natural world has evolved according to the fashions of scientific and artistic enquiry. Much of this work explores a boundary between pure abstraction and ornamentation (modernism and historicism). Both of these opposed systems are seen as forms of abstraction, one against the natural world and the other informed by it.
[edit] Wall zip
Wall zip (for Brancusi and Barnett Newman) is a key work in this project. It references the high-minded seriousness of Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. His zip motif suggests a mystical reality underlying our own that is normally obscured. Wall zip is an ornament-encrusted zip, a wrinkle in space that deforms the wall and, by extension, the building.
Wall zip expresses an implied architectonic lattice. It forms along a vertical line on the wall and grows out horizontally at 60 cm nodes. It is a crystalline ivy that left to its own devices would eventually engulf the wall. In Wall zip the ornament is the structure. Nelson's reworking of Barnett Newman’s zip in this highly ornamental way is a critique of the banality of purist abstraction and the tendency of such (masculine) abstraction to ignore more emotional, embodied (feminine) aspects of experience.
[edit] Dendrite
In Dendrite [2] a series of sculptures and computer based drawings from 2003, bitmap (digital) and vector line (analogue) imagery were combined into the same object. Digital images of winter trees shot in London were manipulated so that half of the tree pattern is digitised or pixellated and half is rendered more naturalistically as a vector drawing. It is a representation of a natural form via technology and asks: Is nature best represented as a series of quanta-like events and objects (bitmap) or as a more dynamic, fluid process (vector)?
[edit] Others
The relationship between art and architecture and art and landscape is another important aspect. Much of his commissioned work, for example, Pollinator Phenotype and Arborescence directly explores this relationship.
These works ask questions such as: how organic (natural) form is appropriated by art, science and design; how their visual codes and models of how the world works become fixed in public consciousness. This concern with the connection between the natural and the artificial manifested in a series of ecological installations in the 1990's including Landscope (The Machine in the Garden) [3]. Representations of nature and nature itself were combined in large scale works that suggest that nature creates art as much as art creates nature.
