Artworks

SIMON LININGTON

2017

Simon Linington’s practice explores, through a range of media, ideas of personal and collective memory and the artists’ role within and without society. In his early career, much of his work stemmed from performative actions, setting himself Sisyphean tasks - such as dragging heavy sheet steel up the many stairs to his studio, rolling a ball of clay equal to his own weight between his studio and the exhibition space, or walking round and round a column of clay for hours and days, wearing his own impression into it - allowing him to detach his mind from the making process in an effort to be a purer conduit of the artistic experience.

These tasks or actions would often result in an object or material trace which is kept and presented as memories of these events. At the same time, he began to collect, categorise and store the material debris of all of his studio and performative activities, and even of past artworks broken down. This vast archive of sifted and sorted detritus now forms the bedrock of his continuing practice and will appear in various forms within his installations and spatial interventions; whether in the form of a bucket of dirty water mopped from his studio floor, rags used to clean himself and the studio stitched together into tapestries, or sorted sand and dust presented in test tubes or specimen jars evoking the memory of seaside sand samples. It is at these moments when there is an intersection between personal, collective and trace memory that Linington’s work resonates most clearly.