Simon Mee

During December/January 2011/2012 C4RD presents an Online Residency by artist Simon Mee, winner of our Royal Academy Watteau prize.

It has been said that History is a story twice told.

I used to draw second hand objects and toys, these toys seemed to have a hidden history about which I could speculate. Over time I realized that it was the secret history and stories contained in or suggested by the objects that was the crucial element, something like a recycled Rorschach blot test. My love of traditional techniques and art history (Watteau in particular) is thus part of this recycling of the pre-loved, not for what they were but as material that can used in response to my concerns, worries and obsessions.

Historical images, like toys, generate a similar nostalgic impulse. This impulse to nostalgia is one that can be redirected and be made less safe or gentrified and become uncanny, dwelling between safe fantasies to suppressed memory. My imagery is inspired by anything that has a combination of emotional pull and the haunted. In the past this includes old postcards, images from books, Google, old movies (Jimmy Stewart in "Harvey"), Schleich toys or an idea that I have to collage together from images that I can source from the aforesaid.

I go through obsessive phases about images that explore something that concerns me. A recurring theme seems to be the tension between humanity and nature and failed utopian dreams. These obsessions have included (among others)old time whaling images, flying monkeys, Buck-Minster Fuller Dymaxion Cars, colonial boys riding goats but the common element is that the image has to have something in it that elicits an instinctual reaction or idea. In this I like to explore my own humanity and what I often see as the absurd and tragic that makes up the pattern of our lives, the less than ideal human that we can all relate to.

My drawings both acknowledge and tease at my own previous antipathy of all things Zen and Buddhist. I hope that my drawings work more like visual koans - to puzzle us about our own self importance in regards our place in the world and in history, a story I'm not sure how many times I've told.

Online Residency