Simeon Nelson works with sculpture, installation and public 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.
He has deployed a huge range of materials, techniques and ideas in his career, most of which has been spent living and exhibiting in Australia and Asia. Born in London he moved to Sydney in 1967 He returned to England in 2001. Since arriving he has been working on numerous projects here and abroad.
He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including being short-listed for the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2003.In 2000 he received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship; in 1997 he was the Australian representative, IX Triennale of India, Delhi India and has been awarded four Australia Council project grants, the 1994 Australia Council residency, Greene St Studio, New York and in 1996 Art/Omi International Artists Colony, New York.
Previous public and commissioned work includes a monumental "statue" of Australian Prime Minister, Ben Chifley in Chifley Square, Sydney; a two-kilometer long sculptural intervention on the M4 freeway in Sydney's west and numerous commissions and consultancies with architects in England and Australia.
His work is included in the collections of the Jerwood Foundation, London, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and numerous other public, university, corporate and private collections in Australia and internationally.
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.
Nelson is currently using metaphors of the bitmap (digital) and the vector line, (analogue. In Dendrite 2003 half of a tree pattern is digitised or pixellated and the upper half is rendered more naturalistically. It is a representation of a natural form via technology. Like much of his preceding work, it begs the question: is nature best represented as a series of quanta-like events and objects (bitmap) or as a more dynamic, fluid process (vector)?
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 beg questions such as: how organic (natural) form is appropriated by art, science and visual culture; 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). Representations of nature and nature itself were combined in large scale works that suggest that nature creates art as much as art creates nature.
