Dr Henrietta Simson

Biography

Artist and researcher Henrietta Simson works with various media to explore the possibilities available to the landscape image in a digital context framed by ecological crisis. Her interest lies in technology’s often invisible writing of our experience of space, a quandary that affects ways of thinking about landscape and images, and how these are defined and encountered. Visual technologies have profoundly impacted our ways of seeing, representing and understanding our environment. Simson’s work presents an idea of landscape that facilitates a critical questioning of this overtly visual structuring of space.
She studied at the Slade, completing an MA in painting in 2007, and a practice-related PhD in 2017. Her thesis explored landscape through medieval and early Renaissance visual forms, the materiality of the image, and Renaissance perspective's role in the history of technological image-making.
Her writing has been published by Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge and Museumsforlaget Press, Cambridge Scholars, Aesthetica Magazine, Minnesota Press and IB Tauris. She has presented her work and the ideas that inform it at institutions including Nottingham Contemporary, The Warburg Institute, The Renaissance Society of America, Stavanger Art Museum, The Lethaby Gallery, Slade Research Centre, Institute of Advanced Study UCL and The Courtauld Institute.
She teaches at Camberwell College of Arts in London and is currently researching the spiritual and material implications of caves, mines and wilderness in contemporary and medieval landscapes.