Simone Slee

Abstract

Help a Sculpture Simone Slee is an artist who produces performative-based sculptural works. Failure, humour and vulnerability continue to emerge as issues in her practice. Her sculptures fall over, others exist for just a moment as sculptural-thought-bubbles in public spaces. Photography is frequently used as a document to witness these events. An area of focus is the neologism she invented, called abfunction. This is a word that describes the unexpected or surprising functions of objects or actions, in contrast to the concepts of the multifunctional or dysfunctional. It is the principle of ‘doing the wrong thing with the right thing’ and its inverse of ‘doing the right thing with the wrong thing’. Simone is the Coordinator of Sculpture and Spatial Practice at the School of Art, VCA & M, University of Melbourne and exhibits with Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne. She has an undergraduate degree in Sculpture from the VCA, 1995, and in Landscape Architecture (RMIT), a Masters in Fine Art from RMIT, 2000, and is currently a PhD candidate at the VCA & M. She was previously an Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholar at the Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main, where she was the guest student of Ayse Erkmen in 2004-6. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, notably at Portikus, Frankfurt, in the Dream Universe exhibition of Yoko Ono and was featured as one of the key artists in the 2003 Melbourne International Arts Festival, Visual Arts Program with her On project. Simone will be giving an overview of her art research and a brief insight into her teaching in Sculpture & Spatial Practice at the VCA & M.