Simone Slee is an artist who produces performance-based sculptural works that are sometimes located in the public or within a social fabric. 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. 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 Head of Sculpture and Spatial Practice at the School of Art, VCA, The University of Melbourne and is represented by Sarah Scout, Melbourne. 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, recently at the India Art Fair (2012), and notably in the exhibitions, Less is More, Heide Museum of Modern Art (2012) and Dream Universe exhibition of Yoko Ono at Portikus, Frankfurt (2005). She was featured as one of five artists in the project, Propositions for an Uncertain Future, curated by Lyndal Jones (2010) and one of the key artists in the 2003 Melbourne International Arts Festival, Visual Arts Program with her On project.
See the work Simone made during her residency