Simon Ogden

Biography

I was a student during the late 1970s and early 1980s, graduating initially from Birmingham Polytechnic with a BFA in Sculpture and then four years later from the Royal College of Art with a Masters in Painting. 

My work draws from a long-held interest in European and American Modernism and Surrealism. In this I interweave my allegiance to the Arts and Crafts tradition, and the long-standing debate about the definition and role of the decorative in the fine arts. Combined together, these forces open the door to a varied dialogue which contains figuration of and symbolic references to the landscape and the body as well as the transformation of materials and the extension of functions.

My studio work moves across painting, object-making, design, printmaking, photography and drawing. Each of these areas of creative activity reinforces and extends the possibilities of my continuing artistic practice. I have always been an avid collector of materials and an obsessive viewer of environments, surfaces, histories and forms. Travel has always been a significant trigger to the expansion of my visual world.

Most of my work is reliant on the gathering of found objects and forms that can suggest a beginning. During the last 15 years I have been building pictures with a variety of materials, for example, by inlaying plywood into plywood, linoleum into linoleum, by pasting canvas onto canvas and building objects out of found materials and forms of all sorts. My work always involves references to the history that these materials had prior to their reprocessing. 

See Simon’s Lockdown Interview here -

About this work

‘ prelude to a dance ‘

“ If you don’t eat your leftovers you wont get any pudding”  was the title of a group of 85 small inlaid linoleum works that I made for a show in 2013 .

The reason for making these wee works was to extend a pictorial narrative by working rapidly and by using the small leftovers that were the refuse from from the larger works on that I was producing in the studio at the same time.

I have continued to work in this way ever since 2013 and ‘ prelude to a dance ‘ is another body of small works which are being designed cut and inlaid  in the studio at this very moment to accompany my two solo exhibitions I have with two of my galleries in New Zealand in April and August of 2021.

Quote from an essay by Damien Wilkins for the exhibition  ‘quiet reflections’ in 2007

What at first glance appears basically a decorative art, a world of designed surface—and the word ‘pretty’ comes easily here—now begins to feel promisingly narrative, as if each piece of lino were a character in a partially submerged story: the pretty surface has depths.

Damien Wilkins.