ABOUT
Early influences
I was lucky enough to grow up in the beauty of the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, attending an independent school in the bush, that nurtured my creative interests. My parents, both scene painters/designers had moved there from the city seeking a cleaner environment for their children. We would often travel back to Sydney for work, camping in a flat above a paint floor. Long hours spent in an imaginative world playing amongst the paint buckets of scenery workshops, dressing up in ‘ball gowns’ back stage... and somehow getting covered in dust and glitter.
Six months into a degree in Theatre Design at NIDA, I deferred to follow my passion to work as a scenic artist at Opera Australia and then overseas to London with the opportunity to experience the famous Drury Lane paint frames. Theatrical scenic painters have for centuries been the masters of spacial illusion. I was fascinated with techniques that can create subtle effects of changing light, or a sense of space and distance with the skilful use of layered colours and textures.
On the way to London my sister and I stopped off in India for a whirlwind textile tour of Rajasthan. I was deeply inspired by the handcrafts of this part of the world. We visited printing, dyeing and weaving workshops. We travelled into the desert on camels and found tiny village communities, where the women practice Bandhani, an ancient dyeing technique still widely used today, masterfully knotting fabric with silk thread between their teeth. It was beautiful chaos that would continue to influence our work.
Whilst working in London I rented a small flat in the Caribbean part of town—Brixton. It was exotic and edgy, the streets throbbed with Reggae, Ska and Bollywood music. Nigerian fabric shops selling extraordinary designs were enthralling with their wax resist technique featuring huge peacocks, chicken wire, cigarettes, house keys, brightly coloured exotic flowers and loud patterns. I studied etching just off Fleet Street and had access to some of the greatest art galleries and museums in the world. I remember in particular seeing Anish Kapoor’s enigmatic Marsyas in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, listening to the softly moaning wind through this alien PVC structure, with a sound that reminded me of a Tibetan long horn. This heralded a new chapter—pursuing a creative world beyond the proscenium arch of the theatre.
Beyond the proscenium
I have always kept a visual diary, as ordinary yet as necessary to me as shopping, cooking and paying the bills. I showed my first sculptural piece in a park in London’s East End with a friend in 2003. It was a large installation that we filmed and went on to be shown in Barcelona at Gallery Zero.
Upon returning home, I continued to practice and exhibit my own artwork—primarily landscapes in mixed media on cotton paper, and etchings. As so often happens with travel, and experiencing other cultures and places, the perspective on my life and priorities changed.
With a small family to support, a graphic design degree at COFA seemed a practical course of action. This led to supplying graphics for creative industries, assisting other artists and designers to present their work in the digital sphere, including websites, logo, branding, animation, illustration, rendering for costume designers and formatting large scale press files for the fashion industry and grand opera.
SIMCOX Wallpaper & textile—using the best of both worlds
In 2014 I founded SIMCOX Designer wallpaper and upholstery.
These collections were developed using skills learnt from traditional scene painting, time-honoured techniques combined with digital technology. Inspiration comes from the fine art world, often landscapes, and the challenge to capture and interpret light.
I love the way that Wallpaper gives you the power to radically change an interior with just the thickness of a piece of paper, much like a canvas backdrop does in theatre.
My aim is to achieve a rich complexity of surface that sits comfortably within a space enhancing the architecture and natural light play. From the high ceilings of Victorian terraces to the contemporary modular structures of today, a feeling of space and light are important features in Australian architecture and these values inform my approach. This is what makes designing wallpaper for an Australian sensibility different from Europe. The emphasis there is on recognisable image patterning. For example, most of my designs become softer and lighter towards the top (there is no vertical repeat), creating the illusion of a higher ceiling. It is only with innovations in digital print that we can achieve such effects in wallpaper.
The design process involves multiple layers of hand painted colour, texture and line work, scanned at a high resolution from which digital compositions are made encompassing a series of vertical drops rather than the traditional tiled repeat. I work hard to maintain the integrity of the hand drawn pen and ink line or brushstroke. It is exciting to combine these traditional, organic, (sometimes messy) techniques with the possibilities of the digital world.