Linda Simon

Performative installation with Filaments Art Collective as part of Medway Open Studios 2024. Each artist designed their own trolley in response to personal narratives including female empowerment, sense of place and wildlife conservation concerns. The trolley performance took place on the streets of old Chatham during the weekend of 13/14 July.

70 x fabric birds sewn using hi-viz fabric, safety mesh

Every few years, birds of the UK, Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are assessed and placed into one of three categories of concern, with red being those identified as in most urgent need of help. The latest figures highlight 70 species of birds on the Red List.

The Red List is an installation of 70 small birds and has been exhibited in 3 locations. Each installation is site-responsive and involves the birds placed on safety mesh and/or in the natural environment.

1. Light and Thread, St George’s Art Centre, Gravesend in 2021

2. Midwinter Night’s Camp for Glow Arts Light Trail, Maidstone - 2022

3. Whose Hoo Heritage Festival, Slough Fort, Hoo Peninsula - 2023

The Hoo Peninsula is littered with derelict buildings, many of which are remote and inaccessible. These redundant buildings, rich in history, now provide valuable habitat for our birds and wildlife.

This site-responsive installation involves placing the birds within a constructed habitat of green safety mesh. It is accompanied by a soundscape of bird songs recorded on Hoo.

For one day only, Filaments Art Collective transformed the historic church of St Mary’s at Burham into a celebration of midsummer. Suspended insulation blankets filled the church with gold and silver marking the transition from the longest day to the longest night of the year.

We invited members of the public to come along and harness the power of the sun to create cyanotype prints using the flora from the churchyard.

A selection of my work made for the 2nd Filaments Arts Collective event held at the ancient church of St Mary’s, Burham in October 2021.

This project was supported by a National Lottery grant from the Arts Council

A series of works capturing the memories of a year of cycling.

Each journey was recorded using the Strava app. The data was then sorted and transformed into knitted objects representing one element of the data, such as miles travelled or calories burnt.

Patterns of behaviour are visualised through patterns of data.

Cotton baby grow, thread, wire

‘…she both sustains the baby’s life and transmits to the infant, through her own particular idiom of mothering, an aesthetic of being that becomes a feature of the infant’s self.’ (Bollas, 1987)

Mothers Operating System (MOS) explores the profound relationship between mother and child and is influenced by my interest in the intersection of technology and textiles, in particular the relationship between textiles, wo(man) and machine.

The actions associated with a mother raising her child (love, cuddle, protect …) are translated into the 0s and 1s of binary code – the programming language used to give instructions to computers – and hand-stitched onto a new-born baby suit.

Exhibited in The Unthought Known at Below65 gallery, Maidstone, Kent, UK

All images © Linda Simon

Knitted acrylic yarn, polyester fill

This piece was made for the exhibition Response at Maidstone Museum in November 2014. 

In response to:  Carcharias Hopei (Sheppey Shark)

In 1991 Damian Hirst exhibited his iconic, formaldehyde shark in a vitrine; a piece designed to shock and bring us face to face with death.  Commonly referred to as the ‘shark in a box’ it is an image embedded in popular culture attracting audiences more for curiosity than artistic value becoming a symbol of the capitalist fine art market.

Soft, cosy using common materials and techniques of low worth and defying conventional display methods, this large knitted shark stuffed in a box is both anarchic and absurd.

All images © Linda Simon

knitted yarn, punch cards, cable ties

Dimensions: variable

Ctrl representsthe Internet as information repository - it suggests data being produced, encoded, transformed, transferred and stored.   Employing a similar mechanism to the earliest computers a domestic knitting machine is used to reproduce punch cards as knitted panels representing data in its rawest form. A series of cards are reconfigured into an ‘evil cat head’, an omnipresent mythical figure that serves as a reminder of the more sinister aspects of online presence.

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Selected for group exhibition 'Tension' at Kaleidoscope Gallery in Sevenoaks, Jan/Feb 2014

Selected for display at Turner Contemporary between 9 October - 10 November 2013 as part of the Platform Graduate Showcase

All images © Linda Simon

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is it a cat, is it a rabbit?

is it me online, is it someone else?

boundaries of space and time have disappeared

it takes a second to communicate via the Internet

it takes an age to knit a small part of the Internet

language and grammar is evolvingLOL ROFL

we exist in multiple planes

we are constantly connected

our smartphone is our best friend

brave new world

data flows – bits, bytes, frames, packets

encryption

hubs, switches, routers, cables

KNITPURLZEROONEPATTERNPROGRAMSTITCHPIXEL  

These works are based on QR barcodes.

QRwerty

Thread, cotton fabric, 25cm x 70cm (approx)

26 cross-stitched QR codes, each representing a letter of the alphabet and arranged in the format of a standard qwerty keyboard. 

All QR codes function when scanned with a smartphone.

Selected for the QR-3D exhibition held at the Cornerhouse as part of Manchester science festival in 2011.

Equivalent VIII

Sugar cubes, mdf board, 8 panels each measures 57cm x 57cm

Each QR code is a different configuration but each will scan to read the same text - "Equivalent VIII". All of them are functional QR codes and work when scanned with a smartphone.

This artwork is a homage to Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, the final and most famous piece from his series of minimalist 'brick' sculptures.  Each consisted of 8 different rectangular configurations formed from 120 fire bricks.  In 1972 the Tate purchased Equivalent VIII and caused a outcry amongst the general public who declared it a waste of taxpayers money.

You knit with great skill Madame

Machine knitted yarn over stretched canvas, 80cm x 26cm

The knitted QR codes can be read by scanning with your smartphone.  The code translates to a passage contained in Charles Dickens 'A Tale of Two Cities' which describes the activities of the revolutionary knitter Madame Defarge who encoded within knitting the names of those condemned to the guillotine during the French Revolution.