Simeon AYRES
Storm Country, the Source of the Sevens Creek 2024
ink and watercolour on paper
22nd Feb — 27th Apr 2025
Simpson Gallery
Simeon Ayres’ practice is defined by landscapes that are aerial, map-like in perspective, while also encompassing more traditional and pictorial depictions. His work is an attempt to understand the animate world – a world that he sees as both alive and intelligent. He looks for the landscape’s hidden voice, its language, its liminality and its magic.
During the process, Simeon finds that the making of a map is a courtship of kinds, a dance that hopefully allows, what he calls, the “creatureliness” of the country to show itself. A completed map becomes an invitation to the viewer to follow the deepening paths back home.
Simeon says: “I walk, I listen, and observe. I feel into the country, its colours, sounds and shapes, its hidden pathways, and secret places. I like to strip back the country of its man-made additions, and speculate as to how it would be before we arrived. I like the idea that in my mapmaking, I am giving the land back to itself, suggesting it could dream once again.”
“I don’t use drones or satellites and very little outside mapping. I prefer to walk, to enter the country with the reverence that it asks. I have yet to find a bottom to the work I wish to make. How to illustrate time? How to tell the story of the way a river snakes across a valley floor over a hundred thousand years? How to illustrate relationality in this sentient world; what is unseen below the ground, the effect of fire and the regeneration of country afterwards? The potential held in seeds, the myriad patterns? There is so much in this world, so much grace still present in the land itself.”
About the Artist:
Simeon Ayres lives with his family on the eastern slopes of Wombat Mountain in the Strathbogie ranges. As a self-taught artist he has developed his own techniques and methods to represent what he feels and sees. For several years Simeon has created commissions for private clients, mapping their country in his style. Prints of his works are available from his website and he has started to exhibit his works locally.