Simon Terrill
Location: Tower Hamlets
Website: www.simonterrill.com Over the last five years, my work has been mostly concerned with a photographic investigation of the space of the crowd. Images have ranged from exploring the crowd’s dark matter to a utopian ideal of liberation and the temporary dissolving of barriers between people. My Crowd Theory series, made in collaboration with the Footscray Arts Centre, is concerned with the structure of communities and relationships formed by virtue of place. These works are photographic-performance-events that are stage-managed public operations involving many collaborators and large groups of people associated with each chosen site. The work plays into the common acceptance of photography being both a fiction and a trace of the real. I see the results of the work as dependent on the dialogue that emerges between these fictional and documentary approaches.
In 1993 I co-founded the theater company Snuff Puppets, studied sculpture 1995 – 98 and gained a Masters of Fine Art in 2005. From 2003 to 2008, I was a lecturer in the department of Art History and Theory and at the Centre for Ideas, at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, devising a number of courses on contemporary art and theory. In 2008, I spent a year in London at the Slade School of Art after wining the Samstag Scholarship. From March 2010, I am back in London beginning with a residency through Bow Arts at the Balfron Tower.
Exhibitions
Recent exhibitions include:
Crowd Theory - Southbank, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; Selected works from the UniSA Samstag Collection, Adelaide Festival Artists’ Week, South Australia; The Audience is the Art, touring with the Big Day Out; Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth; The William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art; Photo-ID, Contemporary Art Norwich 09; Double Orbit, Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London; History of the National Photography Prize Exhibition, Albury Regional Gallery; Vertigo, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne; KP 11, touring Australia for two years, Australia Council for the Arts.
