Arthur Simms

Rich with associations to Arthur Simms' hybrid autobiography, American and Jamaican folk culture, music, art history and world culture, his human-scale sculptures radiate a playful and serious inquiry into concepts of origin and transformation. His art is to a large extent a product of bi-culturalism, a merging of my Jamaican heritage and American education. Through their formal rigor and the poetic associations that the recycled elements trigger, the sculptures narrate stories of personal identity, family, spiritual and physical journeys, erotic tensions and nostalgia for home. His sculptures are usually wrapped in rope and or wire. The laborious action of binding creates spiritual and physical links that construct his cultural history. Incorporating a wide range of materials and mediums, his work explores themes of life's experiences. Over the past two decades, he has been working on a body of sculptures and drawings that evoke memory, loss and cross cultural ties. The work as a group, through object and thought, embodies power and history.