The following text was written by Emma Geliot to accompany the ‘Lucent Lines’ exhibition at Newport Museum. January 2010
A Light Touch
Simon Fenoulhet’s work takes many forms, but there is a common thread that runs thought much of it. It’s the pursuit of this thread that takes his work in so many different directions: He looks for magic in the simple, the ordinary, the practical-by-design.
He could be using bricks, drawing pins, cocktail stirrers, teaspoons. He could find something new like electro-luminescent wire, as he does in this exhibition, or shoe laces. In his hands they take on a new life, become something other than the function they were designed to perform.
A shoelace stands in for a charcoal line. The fuzzy edges mimic the roughly drawn line, subverting what could be a straight geometrical exercise into something more poetic.
The wire, which looks simple enough, has been programmed to react to a computer programme, so that it pulses with light, in a carefully structured sequence. Threaded with brightly coloured drinking straws, which wiggle the straight lines of the wires, the piece glows like neon. It is simply magical and you don’t need to understand the complicated technology behind it to say, “ooh!”
Simon studied Fine Art at Newport College of Art (as University of Wales Newport was) and now he teaches there. In between he has managed an MA in Fine Art at Cardiff College of Art (now UWIC) and been Deputy Director of Cywaith Cymru . Artworks Wales, the National organisation for public art in Wales, which became Safle. He now works with Celfwaith, managing public art commissions. He is also an accomplished musician, which shows in the rhythms that dance through his work
Light has been significant in much of what Simon does. He has brought a gallery-in-waiting to life by night; made a wall see-through; created a glowing universe of LED-lit ping-pong balls and lit up a church. For his Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales Award, he went looking for darkness in the potholes and caves of South Wales. Wriggling through tiny cracks with his camera, he found new ways to record the places where the sun never shines.
But the most poignant thing about Simon’s work is that, without a commission, someone wanting to show it, it doesn’t really exist. The ping pong balls would still be in their boxes, the wire and shoelaces coiled and the straws just so many slurping implements.
As someone who has managed umpteen public art commissions, and made a fair few himself, Simon understands that art is only as interesting as its audience is interested. He really wants to communicate the sense of wonder that he first feels when he sees the potential in a humdrum object, or discovers some new techno- wizardry that can change people’s perceptions about the ordinary things around them.
Simon’s work has a gentle humour and a sympathetic approach. He helps us to re-evaluate the things that we take for granted in our day-to-day life and to see them through new eyes. Everything has possibilities. Emma Geliot
