John Simpson lives and works in Bath, UK.
Painting and printmaking are at the centre of his practice. Often combining paint with print from found or recycled natural materials, he extends the possibilities of mark making. These works fuse image meaning and medium to explore our relationship with the natural world. John’s practice bypasses a dominant extractionist ideology in order to explore a more ecocentric engagement with our environment.
John’s work also embraces symbiosis and elements of chaos. This is reflected through the natural mutations which occur in the print processes that are interwoven within the paintings. This idea is most explicit when creating live works with shifting external influences involving public collaborators, such as the print installation 'Mitosis'. This series of large scale woodcuts of cellular imagery begins to mutate as more visitors to the gallery participate in pressing the prints.
Other works question the role of technology in enabling a paradigm shift towards a symbiosis with nature. This idea was explored in the interactive work Museum as Ecosystem (Tate Exchange, 2019). GPS movement data from participating visitors to Tate Modern was mapped into a large landscape drawing and interwoven with woodcut prints of mycorrizal root networks.
