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Contemporary artist Simone Douglas' work incorporates installation, photography, sculpture, video and durational site-specific works.. Since the late 1990s Douglas has dedicated her practice to observing and revealing the way light activates the land and the sky. Her work re-examines the sublime, memory and time, and questions the visual tensions between “seeing” and “perceiving,” 

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 Predominantly known for her photographic work, Douglas has also dedicated her practice to land art. Continuing her commitment to an engagement with the landscape and ideas about site, her current work One of her current active durational multi-site-specific art works, Ice Boat, enacts a poetic engagement with cultural histories, land and environmental responsibility. Significantly, Ice Boat is conceived as a poetic symbol of reparation and continues Douglas’ commitment to using her practice to encourage engagement with the environment, social history and inter-cultural dialogue. The ice sculpture will be installed directly into the desert regions in Australia. As the ice boat melts, following the arc of the sun, it leaves behind a “trace” of water, a shadow of traveling light. And as the water returns life to the land, it reveals the after burn of native wild flowers. The visual poeticism of a boat emerging from the land and returning to the land, indirectly, it carries a powerful reference to a cyclical movement, a motion always in a state of becoming. 

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Douglas’ work was recently exhibited alongside leading contemporary photographic artists including, William Henry Fox Talbot, May Ray, Låszló Moholy- Nagy, Christian Marclay, Thomas Ruff, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, in Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, curated by Geoffrey Batchen at the Lovett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand. She has been curated into important international exhibitions including, Recent Acquisitions for the Photography Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom; Aberrations, The Photographers Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Sites of Knowledge, Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, United States; Antipodean Emanations: Cameraless Photographs from Australia and New Zealand, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, Australia; Portrait of my Mother, Galerie Matisse, Institute François, London, United Kingdom; Sequester, Australian Embassy Gallery, Washington DC, United States; Sun to Sun, Christopher Bucklow & Simone Douglas. Artereal, Rozelle, Australia; Light Works, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Stand in Landscape, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, China; Sight Seeing, CAFA Gallery, Beijing, China; Minimal, The Australian Centre For Photography, Sydney, Australia; Photography & Place, Australian landscape photography 1970’s Until Now, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography!, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.

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Her work has been featured in international contemporary anthologies and in major publications including, ArtForum, Conveyor, Blind Spot, Photofile, Art + Australia, Creative Camera and (not only) black + white. Her collections include: The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; New South Wales Department of Education, Sydney, Australia; State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

 

In addition to her artistic practice Douglas has curated on behalf of the Getty Conservation Institute, the Australian Museum, the Pingyao International festival and the Auckland Festival of Photography.  

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Central to her work is advocacy and advancement for the role of art as key part of shaping and understanding our collective future

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