Simon Woolham

Severed (2008)

Simon Woolham’s work is concerned primarily with occupied spaces and the narratives that unfold in them. “My drawings of school playing fields, junked underpasses and the like often contain text with the tone of dialogue. Through these glimpses of speech the dilapidated environments come to life in a skint version of enchantment: a tree stump or a broken fence are filled with the meanings of the events that go on around and about them.”

In his attempts to unearth this unpredictable and fragile process of memory, he uses biro drawings, models, animation, video and text. More recently he has made a series of models, films and animations and text that focus on recurring motives that often feature in the work – ditches, unofficial dumps and breached security fences. His films bring to life a series of landscapes that are digitally manipulated, coloured and made to move. Outdoor scenes are modified to show some minor action in repetitive motion. These subtle movements such as a falling roof or clicking fence humorously draw attention to the miniscule, the enhanced sound of each action dramatizing life’s kinetic force. The work is unassuming, quite often made from simple materials and with seemingly modest aspirations. It is their quotidian qualities, however, that charges them with emotion, not that those emotions are easy to identify. It is not that these works are personal or autobiographical that obscures their emotional content, it is the fact that they are irreducibly, irrevocably unsettling. These sites are the scenes of humiliation as well as innocent play, of rejection and failure as well as fantasy and adventure. They are as sweet as other people’s children and as deadly as your own worst memories.

Simon Woolham is currently making new commissioned work for a collaborative RSA Arts & Ecology and Animate animation project, and the Tatton Park Biennial.

_{Image: Severed, 2008 (still) © Simon Woolham}