Guest Speaker 12- Simon Weldon

How do you think about the human experience?

Simon Weldon is one of the technicians at the university, as well as just finishing his master’s of research, he talks through his latest project. “Loiners” re-examines his relationship with his father after his passing, through archive photos. He called it a “lifetime project” as it’s something he’ll always come back to, and projects are never finished. His work portrays how his father was consumed by his alcohol addiction as a functioning alcoholic and the effect it had on his life and also his mother’s. His work is similar in that sense to Tom Duffield’s work.

The project is a response to his father’s photographic archive which Simon digitised through scanning the slides and negatives. He mimicked how his dad would’ve experienced this process.

He found some self-portraits of his dad in the archive and decided to re-perform some of the photos. I found the way he used self-portraits to relive his dad’s experience very interesting and as I am working with self-portraits and performing this is something that I am wanting to learn more about and experiment with. Different ways of approaching the human experience, particularly the female experience are things that I plan to explore in my work.

Simon’s website: https://www.simonweldon.co.uk/

Screenshot from Simon’s website