Jen Simms’ weavings excite me with their crazy materials and their strange sense of order teetering on chaos. Or is it chaos teetering on order?
Either way, they’re never still.
And she uses materials I don’t expect to see in a weaving — part of a plastic onion bag or a hunk of wadded-up packing tape — side by side with cut-up drawings and more traditional weaving materials like yarn or wool.
The Gill artist and Greenfield Community College art professor will be exhibiting “New Weavings,” at Herter Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Wednesday, Oct. 19, through Wednesday, Nov. 16. An opening reception on Oct. 19 will run from 4 to 6 p.m., and also celebrate the opening of fellow GCC colleague Kelly Popoff’s concurrent exhibit at Herter. Popoff’s body of work, “O Children,” consists of works on paper based on photographs of children she found in a 1956 elementary school yearbook.
Many of Simms’ larger weavings take on the topic of climate change.
“Basically, it’s that idea of the absurdity of the human species,” Simms says. “So many of us know that the choices we’re making are changing the environment, and we just go on making them, myself included.”
In 2014, Simms was awarded an artist’s residency by the Provincetown Community Compact, of Provincetown. She spent three weeks at one of the remote, primitive shacks in the wild dunes of the Cape Cod National Seashore, weaving and making ink drawings that she dipped in the sea.
Simms began her large, 85-by-80-inch, multimedia weaving, “The Year that the Ocean Died,” in the dune shack, incorporating flotsam and jetsam she picked up along the beach with strips of paper from her ink drawings, cardboard, plastic netting, other papers, wool, yarn and a myriad of other materials.
Simms says, “That’s when I had a lot of clarity about this idea about the landscape and us changing the landscape. Even when we’re at the dune shack, it’s beautiful! It’s so idyllic. And then you come across the trash in the ocean, at every step. And there’s something so gorgeous about that, too.”
This last statement seems possible for Simms to say only because she is able to see the potential to turn trash into art. The trash is only gorgeous after she’s worked with it.
While her larger pieces have tended to address climate change, Simms also makes smaller weavings that are responses to everyday occurrences. One of these, “The Sun Rises over Fear,” Simms made after encountering a snake while dropping her son off at a friend’s home.
“I have this total fear of snakes, so I screamed,” Simms recalls with a laugh. “But the mom of his friend goes out — it’s this big snake, just hanging out in the sun — and just shooshes him off with her foot.”
The curving shape of the snake winds along the lower portion of the weaving, and the fringe of another weaving set behind it suggests the rising sun.
Another small weaving, “Joy Bomb,” which you can see on Simms’ website, came about because of the confluence of two events: one personal, the other political.
Her daughter had come by to visit and to work with her in the studio, Simms says.
“And I was so happy that she was in the studio with me,” Simms says in a lilting voice. Then her tone grows more serious. “But it was also the day of the Istanbul bombings. And so I had this conflict, should we be talking about this? I didn’t want to ruin the mood of, ‘my daughter’s in the studio with me!’
“And so that’s how I work: with these little ideas and then these bigger ideas and then trying to bring them together.”
Weaving seems the perfect medium for this. Quite literally, Simms is able to bring together disparate objects in her work. Simms describes this elegantly in her artist statement, where she writes, “My woven abstractions, landscapes and portraits are emotional reactions to the absurdity of the human species, world politics, and our changing environment. Their chaotic nature represents the inability to understand what is going on in our world, while the underlying grid of the warp and weft provides an anchor to human’s ability to hope. These conflicting narratives echo the tensions balanced within our everyday experiences as we preserve our optimism and attempt to understand this crazy world of beauty and blight.”
Jen Simms’ exhibition, “New Weavings,” will be on view at Herter Art Gallery, 125a Herter Hall, University of Massachusetts-Amherst starting Wednesday, Oct. 19 through Wednesday, Nov. 16. Hours: Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. The gallery is closed Saturdays and on all state public holidays. Phone: 413-545-0976.
See more of Simms work at:
jensimms.com