Artist and researcher Henrietta Simson works with a variety of media to explore the possibilities available to the landscape image in a digital context framed by ecological crisis. Her interest lies in technology’s often invisible writing of our experience of space, a quandary that affects ways of thinking about landscape and images, and how these are defined and encountered. Visual technologies have profoundly impacted our ways of seeing, representing and understanding our environment. Simson’s work presents an idea of landscape that facilitates a critical questioning of this overtly visual structuring of space.
She completed an MA and a PhD at the Slade, UCL. Her doctoral thesis was supervised by Professors Joy Sleeman, Alison Wright and Lisa Milroy RA. In it she explored landscape through medieval and early Renaissance visual forms, the materiality of the image, and Renaissance perspective's role in the history of representational image-making. She has published widely on the landscape image and has presented her work and the ideas that inform it at international institutions. She is currently researching the spiritual and material implications of caves, mines and wilderness in contemporary and medieval landscapes. She teaches at Camberwell College of Art.