Simon Terrill
Simon Terrill, Rebel Angels #3, Type C print, 80 x 80cm.jpg
Simon’s current work / research interests are seeking to recontextualize Elias Canetti’s 'Crowds and Power' (1962) as a foundation for reimagining the crowd through a more-than-human lens, where bodies merge with technology and ecology, proposing a new grammar of the crowd. Understanding the crowd as a verb, simultaneously action, occurrence, and state, this new work seeks to position it as an emergent onto-epistemological object. It employs a crowd- as-process approach, where states of being and emergence operate within fluid, recursive feedback loops. Situated at the intersection of fine art and philosophy, this research aims to articulate the crowd as a learning, anarchic, and fluid entity.
This research into the concept of crowd-as-process seeks a language of potential form through a methodology that embraces chance, disorder and the anti-frame of the crowd. This approach navigates the non-places of the social construct: the bits and pieces of networks, communities and organizational modes that fall outside of perceptions of value, worth, and attention. The crowd is not a network, yet it is linked. The crowd is not a community, yet it has shared, if fleeting, purpose. The crowd cannot be trusted, it will do what it will do. The crowd cannot be framed, it refuses its capture. In this way, the crowd potentially becomes the ultimate refusal.
Simon Terrill, Nouns of Assembly, Installation view, Sutton Gallery.
Simon Terrill is a Senior Lecturer at London South Bank University and a Somerset House Studios Resident Artist alumni (2017 - 2023). Working with photography, sculpture, installation, drawing and video, his work investigates relations between architectural spaces and their received narratives, public and private identities, and the idea of the crowd as a tool to examine architecture, identity, community and a performance of self. His ongoing Crowd Theory project consists of large-scale stage-managed public events resulting in exhibitions at the sites of their creation along with collaborations with museums and public galleries to extend these images and stories outwards.
His work has been exhibited in museums and public galleries internationally, including the National Portrait Gallery London, Vitra Design Museum, Royal Academy, Nunnery Gallery, Royal Institute of British Architects, Samstag Museum of Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, National Trust Ernő Goldfinger Museum and QUT Art Museum. It has featured in The Guardian, Wallpaper, Art+Australia, Art Monthly, BBC, photographies, The Big Issue, Realtime and Meanjin amongst others. Awards include The Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and National Gallery of Victoria Trustees Award. Terrill is represented by Sutton Gallery Australia.
Simon Terrill, Balfron Tower, type C analogue print, 162cm x 200cm