Page 121 - 9781909825086_interior_cover.indd

Aled Simons
Born 1982
Lives and works in Swansea, UK
www.aledsimons.tumblr.com

Aled Simons’s work includes collage, installation, video, photography, text and
performance. Often with a light-hearted approach, His work draws on notions
of discovery and rediscovery, the collective conscience and archival research.
Simons’ attempts to present a vision of the past, present and future, exploring
ideas surrounding re-discovery and re-creation as a form of creation, forming a
possible past, foreseeable future and an unperceived present. Through searching
for, surrounding himself with, and amassing collections of previous existences
and individual histories, landscapes are formed through process of selection and
collage. The atmosphere of these landscapes alludes to an unknown time or
space in which a collective history lies.
An archive for when there is no archive or a record when all records have been
erased. A document of a few singular instances captured across a multitude of
plains. Somewhere within the divergence, a universal truth is formed, discovered
or unearthed, creating or locating a direct connection to a collective memory
through the process of combining previously owned artefacts and their
imprinted history.
ALED SIMONS has worked extensively with Art’s Birthday Wales, and studio based artist
collective Supersaurus, both of which he co-founded. These groups have focused on social and
interactive performances and events within a local and global artistic context. His performance
work has taken the form of a tongue in cheek, post-apocalyptic, covers band that attempt
to recreate the hits of the 1980s as if all record of it had been wiped out by some form of
catastrophe. His collage series ‘The Arrangement’ won Welsh Artist of the Year mixed media
prize in 2011.

Far right: Iris, 2013, Collage.
h: 17cm w: 14cm, Artist’s Collection.
Top: Untitled, 2013, Collage.
h: 25cm w: 18cm, Artist’s Collection.
Right: Arrangement #15, 2011, Collage.
h: 10cm w: 8cm, Artist’s Collection.

120 121