Bio

Henrietta Simson's work reappraises the visual and spatial structures that inform western notions of landscape and seeks to move beyond its identity as the ‘de facto’ representational image.  Instead, she proposes a defamiliarised mode of looking that incorporates the systems hidden by normative definitions. Using various media to re-imagine the landscape image, she develops affective and material alternatives to realism.  The works push at the boundaries between image and object, between illusion and embodied presence.  They involve re-visiting the beginnings of the western visual tradition and plotting a different trajectory for the landscape image at this crucial juncture of history. 

She teaches at Camberwell College of Arts in London and is currently researching the spiritual and material implications of wilderness, its caves and mines in contemporary and medieval landscapes.


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She completed an MA in painting (2007) and a practice-related PhD (2017) with a thesis titled, Landscape After Landscape, Pre-Genre Backgrounds in a Post-Genre Digital Age.  This explored landscape through medieval and early Renaissance visual structures, the materiality of the image, and Renaissance perspective's role in the history of representational image-making.  She won the Threadneedle Prize for Painting and Sculpture (2011), and her work has been selected for Volta New York (2010),  New Contemporaries (2006), the John Moores Painting Prize (2010) and the Jerwood Drawing Prize - in 2005, and as Simson&Volley in 2012. 

Simson&Volley is a partnership founded with fellow artist Jo Volley in 2009.  The pooling of resources expands their conceptual and material understanding of artmaking and they define their collaboration as a ‘dual imagination’.  The majority of their collaborative works have been in response to a proposition.  Inspired by connections to place and spaces through time, history and memory, their works explore ideas of pictorial illusion in architectural spaces, aural architecture, and are concerned with measurement, space and colour as light.

Simson&Volley Projects