Point North was developed during Simone Darcy’s residency at the NES Artist Residency in Skagaströnd, northwestern Iceland, and through an extended road trip around the country with her two children.
Immersed in Iceland’s elemental landscapes, the work responds to the stark environment, exploring motherhood, memory, and connection to landscape and place, as well as the psychological and physical effects of the environment on the body and psyche. Image portals and performance portraiture offer layered compositions of landscape and place that evoke transformation, impermanence, and the unseen forces shaping identity. Point North has been exhibited at the Reykjavík Museum of Photography, Verge Gallery Sydney, and in the Experimental Photo Prize at Gaffa Creative Precinct, Sydney.
About Simone Darcy
Darcy is an Australian photo based artist whose practice navigates performance, repetition, and the materiality of image making across straight and hybrid photographic forms. Her work is committed to ecological responsibility and sustainability, employing eco friendly techniques including experimental darkroom interventions, eco gumoil, and phytogram processes. She is interested in how gestures, traces, and materials carry memory and meaning, often revealing what lies beneath the surface. Performance operates not as documentation but as a method of constructing still images and abstract viewpoints, exploring the tension between order and chaos, structure and decay, and feminine personae across time.
Recent exhibitions include Dark Brew The Alchemist at Rosny Arts Centre; Embody at Cement Fondu, Sydney; Light Objects Photography in the Expanded Field at Perth Centre of Photography; and The Tors at Hill End Analogue Photography Festival.
Her practice has been recognized through numerous prizes and awards, including the Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize, Gosford Art Prize, Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize at Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, the National Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, the Head On Portrait Prize at the Australian Centre of Photography, the Portrait Prize at Queensland Centre of Photography, the New York Photo Prize, the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photographic Prize, MAMA National Photography Prize, Melbourne Photobook Image Award, and the Ilford Salon Portrait Award at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. [Official Website]
