Sally Simpson: Artist Statement & Bio

Sally Simpson draws inspiration and materials from specific sites in order to capture our moment in time, a period of rapid change with anxieties about the future, she states. Her working process begins as time spent on site, contemplating and collecting. Transformation of collected materials acts as a metaphor for the state of flux and transformation of the sites she engages with.

Her intention is to represent the present for an unknown future museum. She creates objects which belong to a continuous cross cultural tradition of humans attempting to influence and manage the forces that affect the world around them. Simpson says she creates objects that belong to a continuous cross-cultural tradition - humans have and continue to attempt to influence and manage the forces that affect the world around them.

Simpson’s work reflects her fascination with the way values and meaning, assigned to land and the environment, change over time according to point of view, culture and situation. She uses unexpected methods to transform natural and man-made materials found at particular sites, creating sculptures that evoke artefacts and specimens and drawings that reflect the fragility of the environment.

Her process draws on the tradition of humans making sense of the natural world through making artefacts and drawings with local materials.

In 2014 she travelled to Lake Gregory/Parraku in northern WA with a group of artists and writers. This lake system is the site of the oldest artefacts in Australia, and presents a variety of cultural, archaeological and environmental layers.

Simpson began her studies at the South Australian School of Art in 1982 and completed her BA at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. She was the recipient of the Meroogal Women’s Art Award in 2006 and the ANU Student Drawing Prize in 2007.

Her Master of Philosophy in Practice-Led research in Sculpture at ANU School of Art was informed by materials and influences from her life on a small farm near Berry, New South Wales and participation in Contested Landscapes (2010), a field studies project run by the Environment Studio at ANU, focusing on Lake Mokoan near Benalla, Victoria.

She currently lives on a small farm on the outskirts of Canberra.