KIRSTEN SIMS | AWAY

In the Aegean, transience is normal. Islands appear and disappear in the heat; theedges of things – land, buildings, thoughts – feel tremulous in the dazzling light.– Jennifer Higgie

AWAY continues the exploration of an integral theme within Sims’s oeuvre: place, in all its geographical and psychosocial dimensions. But in this new body of work, there is an emphasis on the tensions that arise between presence and absence in relation to place – ”away” speaks simultaneously of the freedom of escape and of devastating distance.

Inspired by a 2023 trip to the Greek Isles – and the conflicting experiences of idyllic retreat and longing for home – these paintings are not simply renditions of picture-postcard vistas. Rather, the artworks serve as collages of a sort. Sims combines fragments of multiple references to create landscapes that map out both outer and inner worlds, drawing on sources both concrete and intangible, ranging from personal holiday photographs and anonymous portraits unearthed in second-hand shops, to artworks from past exhibitions, made-up memories and actual accounts. Ina series of painterly urges and impulses that vary from accidental to more controlled, these fugitive fragments mingle together in juxtapositions that reflect the bittersweet, multi-coloured and heightened emotions embodied in going and being away.

The sense of “away”, of distance, is further suggested in temporal terms. A 12-month space between the then of the concrete event and the now of portrayal offers fertile ground for the play of memory and reflection to enhance and distort. Time feels elastic, as a two-week, ephemeral event– once saturated with the exotic, the novel and a quickening of the senses – is transformed into an experience of disproportionate longevity, one that defies linear narrative. Paradoxically, time is both elusive and ever present, inescapable – and so too, perhaps, is place.

What’s more, in the very moments of holiday delight and respite, absence and presence wrestle continuously. The need for surrender, for mindfulness and presence, struggles against the creative(and human) compulsion to capture, portray, preserve – to do.

In addition, Greece itself, that location of blissful, sun-drenched beaches and fleeting holidays – a place of lightness – is simultaneously located within weighty history and antiquity; its ubiquitous ruins so integral to the landscape speak of ancient heydays of empire, now rubble, monuments to the paradox of transience and permanence, of presence and absence.

The result of these myriad stimuli is work that revels and wrestles in the overlaps, tensions and paradoxes of the human experience – the interplays and in-betweens so rich and delightful in Sims’s practice. Meaning multiplies in these spaces, in conversations between characters, between different artworks, between image and title, between contrasting emotions, between real and imagined, between anticipation and retrospection. As ever, colour and light play key roles in these dynamics, with Sims’s innate understanding and adroit treatment of light describing, so wonderfully, the dazzling, the dark and the twilight, the experience of both serenity and unease.