Week 1 - Artist profile: Emily Simek

"Emily Simek uses an expanded practice in digital art, sculpture and installation to investigate the genesis of material beings, exploring what constitutes a lifespan and the conditions that sustain lively ecologies. Her practice acknowledges the agency of materials and their situated, interdependent relationships. Materials, living beings and technologies are approached as collaborators and companions during processes in art-making."

( ^ I love this description and want to be making work like this!!!)

I came across Simek's work last year through Instagram and have been curious about how she uses installation and digital mediums to explore themes around interconnection, non-human agency, ecology and biological systems. Simek recently completed their MFA at VCA, Australia, and outside of her art practice works as a physiotherapist in a pediatric ward. This resulting knowledge of body systems and integration, along with an innate curiosity about the body and the world that she describes as present in her physiotherapy work, has influenced her artmaking methodology. Simek's recent works examine posthumanist theory and the notion of all matter and all beings being interconnected/interrelated - the effects that come from your actions are actually the result of multiple inputs, i.e. the environment you're in, your ecosystem (social, physical, etc.). This idea of interconnection and curiosity was critical in my studio practice throughout last year, although I struggled to articulate it. The imaginary component of Simek's Zbrush drawings resonated a lot when I was making my gestural VR "memory-field" drawings last year (used in Surface Tension). Below are a few works of Simek's in particular that I find interesting, either for their content or their exhibition, and for the methodology behind their creation:

C O M P O S T I N G . . .

VCA Graduate Exhibition, 2021.

Composting... is a body of work that was co-created with a worm farm compost system. It explores the ways in which my art practice intra-acts with nutrient cycles at the site of a compost heap. The composting of organic waste through a worm farm forms a rich humus, from which 3D scanning technologies, digital rendering, microscopic filming and the animation of organic materials were used to form an evolving collective of digital compost. Composting...investigates the cross-pollination of matter from these two organic and digital compost systems as they feed into each other via recursive processes in the re-circulation of materials. It explores the potentialities of closed-loop systems in art making practices.

In the exhibition visitors enter into a darkened space. Television screens are suspended like grow lights above a cluster of soft sculptures on which you can recline. Looking up at videos of digital worms involves reorientating to their/our earthly homes, your body now contained within its techno-compost workings. The soft sculptures are made using 3D scans of the skins of vegetable scraps. These digital renders are printed onto cotton fabric and sewn to form soft pillows filled with sugar cane mulch. Their scent is fragrent and sweet. Laying down beneath the screens, a soft textural soundscape accompanies you, a recording of compost critters made using a contact microphone. In an adjacent space, microscopic footage of compost traces decomposition through the slippage of pixels in a video projection (see this video installation here). Together, these works form a lively assemblage that traced my relationships within a multi-species compost community.

S P A C E J A M

3 x 3 @vcaartspace, digital exhibition, 3 - 7 August 2020.

Space Jam was part of the online group show 3 x 3 @vcaartspace (2020). The work is a celebration of feminine digital chaos. The 3D modelling program ZBrush has been used to create a constellation of digital sculptures. This orgy of slippery shapes frolic within a grey digital void. Captured mid flight, they whirl in a symphonic revelry. The work is a playful submission to uncertainty, where unknown outcomes are reframed as chance delights.

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Notes from interview with Emily Simek on Interbeing

- uses Zbrush to sculpt digital organisms, beginning as nuclei and creating one per month and allowing them to evolve and morph into a rhizomatic organism

- discusses creating multiple works in part due to the file constraints (something I've encountered in Blender and GravitySketch - VR drawing program); once you get past a certain point of complexity, computers

begin to struggle and crash... you work with what you can.

- after finishing a model, Simek takes multiple still shots of the model from different angles, choosing the most interesting ones to put forward for web viewing; importantly distinguishes the difference between the work and these images of the work - they are more like representations of the work, but are not the work itself. I know this is an issue Elvis had last year in their VR drawing practice and is something I've also wondered about in working in VR myself - how do you convey what you need to when the digital physicality of a work isn't presentable or evident through documentation?

- thinking about technology as a means of creation; what does that organism require? What is asked of the artist in their labour, and how does that intersect with the digital?

- when we create, the relationship is not one way - there's an ongoing conversation that occurs between the artist and their surroundings and the work

- body parts, organic matter, etc. are not scary, but curious. We may pathologize certain things, but ultimately they are forms of matter with their own structures and systems. This is quite relevant I think given the current pandemic we live in - "looking at things we don't understand can be scary...when we look at abstract forms that allude to bodily processes, either pathological or benign, it can be quite unsettling"

I N T E R B E I N G

Digital residency, George Paton Gallery, 1st - 31st July 2020.

Interbeing is a 3D digital organism that grew via daily acts of sculpting during a one month residency at George Paton Gallery. Created using the 3D modelling program ZBrush, the digital organism began as a nuclei and expanded via daily additions to form a complex rhizome. As it grew, it’s slippery limbs branched outwards to form clusters like microorganisms in the early stages of evolutionary development.

Interbeing framed my process of art-making as the development of a symbiotic relationship between the self and digital organism. My acts of sculpting and editing via the program ZBrush became substitute for the provision of sustenance and grooming which enable the entity to thrive. In turn, the organism functioned online with myself as a beneficiary. This relationship is a framework used to re-evaluate the power relations between user and technology. Contextualised within the COVID-19 pandemic and an increased dependence on digital platforms, Interbeing subverts these dynamics to question what the digital matter needs from the artist to survive.

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Edit: after posting one of my video experiments on my instagram page I had a small comment conversation with Simek. Not that other people's opinions on what I'm doing matter too much, but still... kind of validating and encouraging :) In future once I figure out what I'm focusing on a bit more clearly, I would like to reach out to them about their practice.