Artist Overview
Simon Denny’s practice emphasizes relationships within communities of things; complex sculptural combinations of objects found, bought, gathered and made. There is a privileging of the simple and the old. Denny’s approach is sculpturally holistic, seeking and building upon analogous connections between the various formal aspects of his work.
Typically, Denny’s sculptural installations are formed from predetermined fragments then assembled within a given space, which to a significant extent determines the final form and content of the work. The finished work is thus more accurately described as the formal resolution of Denny’s working process, of sensing and facilitating interconnections between composite elements and the ideas they can contribute to a larger project.
Denny presents his audiences with situations that tend to foreground an engagement with associations of form, purpose and action. Distinctively rough-shod, ad-hoc constructions of everyday materials are combined with – and are often comprised of - domestic ready-mades. Denny’s apparent crude modesty of form belies the poetic intelligence of the works coming-to-be and sculptural conceit. Denny’s art-making is rooted in doing; considerations of performance and acts of making which embed the artists gesture and activity in his objects – objects chosen in the first instance for the character and activity they already inhabit.
Simon Denny currently lives and works in Auckland.