How do you describe your own art practice?
As an attempt to understand and explore the planet as a sculptural object – to test its limits, to sense its processes and to report back on how it feels. In recent works I have pictured our fragile position on the Earth, and explored our entangled interdependence with our fellow ‘Earthlings’ – the trillion species, the rocks and the gasses that we share this planet with, and that we humans tend to call ‘nature’.
Simon Faithfull, HD video, 6min loop, 2019
Which question or theme is central in your work?
Where am I?
How do I understand my own small place in space and time – as set against the unfathomable size and complexity of the processes around me?
Simon Faithfull, HD video, 12min, 2012
What was your first experience with art?
Isn’t everybody’s first experience with a big fat pencil in their fist – way before they could articulate what they were doing and why it felt so great?
My first memory of contemporary art would be at the Tate (now Tate Britain) with my mum, or maybe Robert Hughes’: ‘Shock of the New’ on TV.
Simon Faithfull, Live transmission and HD Video, 9min 2014
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
My hammock.
Simon Faithfull, HD video (silent), 9min, 2016
What do you need in order to create your work?
Other than my hammock, my standard tools are my camera, something to write with, my iPhone (for the basic sketching app that I designed with a programmer), and sadly, these days an internet connection. All of that is fairly necessary to produce work, but far more important is having the time to dream (often on trains), books to read, films to see and friends to discuss things with.
Temporary earthwork (speed of Earth's spin cut into ground), 2019
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
The beauty of some of my 9-year-old daughter’s drawings, and today Regina Jose Galindo’s ‘Earth’.
Simon Faithfull, Digital Photograph, 2022
