What I dream about when I Dream about Flying

An Exhibition of Work by Simon Garrett

May 13th to June 12th 2021

There is a fresh insight to form, shape and colour where we are given a new experience, not one we know, a revelation of the language of art form.

Simon`s work makes you reset your ideas about sculpture at the same time as his enticing colours and shapes tell you just to enjoy yourself in the dream landscapes he creates.

One can follow the development of these imaginative objects in Simon`s sketchbooks which will also be on show, where interlocking, ever-changing lines create interesting spaces and a sense of constant movement.

Thinking outside the box is good for everyone after months of Covid constraints, and this show is certainly a mind-stretcher, with Simon`s paintings, often using his fingers, having the same restless flow as the drawings.

After Simon left the Slade School of Art he worked in various fields, including as a design engineer for Frank Costin, designer of the early Lotus racing car and later on, the design and build of the Bluebird Electric land speed record car for Sir Malcolm Campbell’s grandson.

Using a wide range of materials for his pieces, including paint, resin, wax, metal, glass, wood, plastic and even vegetables, he tries, as he says “To make pieces which will embody Space, either literally, or by suggestion”.

Click below for Simon Garrett in Conversation with Glenn Ibbitson about his show at the Gallery.

SIMON GARRETT

I graduated from the Slade in 1983 where my principal tutors were Stuart Brisley and Rita Donagh. I exhibited at the Young Contemporaries at the ICA in roughly 1982. I left art school with a strong conviction that I would be unable to support myself making art without an eternity of begging to the Arts Council. Since I also had unresolved issues of meaning, only produced approximately two works p.a., and was anxious to put as much distance as possible between myself and structuralism, I trod water as a life insurance salesman. Through a haphazard sequence of events I then had the opportunity to work with Frank Costin (designer of the Vanwall and early Lotus racing cars etc.) as a design engineer. I am one of the relatively few artists who have designed a land speed record car, the Bluebird Electric, which set the British Land Speed record for electric vehicles at Pendine in 2000.

The geometry central to engineering structures is not so very far from the formal aspects of the object matter of art. The discipline also, if not a search for truth, at least requires adherence to it. There is however no subject matter.

At some point this lack of content became irksome and I started "art" drawing again apropos of nothing deliberate. The first inkling that my "issues of meaning" could be resolved came through a combination of this aimless doodling and working with the notion of time (it was 1999 and time was "in the air") and it's relation to consciousness.

The theme of time has not lasted (!) and my work has gradually shifted toward structures semi-consciously aimed at evoking a useful stasis; through volume in the object or paint, and/or a non-representational perspective suggested by colour.

I half remember a quote along the lines of "for a work of art to succeed you must be able to live in it" (I will send a fiver to anyone who can tell me the exact wording and who said it): I hope I am able occasionally to evoke that perceptual volume in my work.