Staged Theoretical | Michael Simms & Kirk Page 

Eloise Cato Gallery 25 November – 20 December 2025

Essay by Lucie Reeves-Smith

The wild natural beauty of Bundanon, on the New South Wales South Coast, has been a fertile and productive site for artistic residency exchanges since its conception as a gift from Arthur and Yvonne Boyd to the Australian people and local community in 1993. Over two weeks in 2024, Adelaide-born contemporary painter Michael Simms engaged with the site’s ideals of multi-disciplinary knowledge sharing with an unprecedented collaboration with Munanjali actor, dancer and creative director, Kirk Page, combining movement, photography and painting to examine the institutionalised concept of marriage through a queer lens and First Nations experience. Representing a daring departure from Simms’ previous paint-based figurative practice, the photographic series that emerged from the pair’s collaboration was experimental and process-based, providing a critique of Australia’s still-present divides along lines of race and sexual identity, resonant with iconographic echoes of Arthur Boyd’s own celebrated Brides series, created 75 years ago. 

Overlapping their respective practices of portraiture and movement-based artistic expression, Page and Simms play themselves the roles of the two protagonists in this queer love story between two people and the landscape. Playing with the introduction of framing devices made of local timber, and atmospheric photographic manipulations, the series is imbued with a dream-like tension. Inadvertently, it recalled the theatrical surrealism of Arthur Boyd’s seminal modernist suite, the conscious-stricken paintings known as Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste (1957 - 1960). While the site of Bundanon at Shoalhaven was inextricably linked with Boyd’s later sublime depictions of the landscape, the luminous ‘Brides’ series remain his most powerful works, expressing the artist’s humanism and deep compassion for Australia’s First Nations community. Respected Indigenous academic Dr Marcia Langton AO has read the series as an attempt by the artist to atone for his inheritance of wealth, land and privilege, the historical proceeds of violent colonisation.1 A heightened allegorical drama, it presents a doomed love story between an aboriginal man and his young wife of a mixed racial background, their futile desperation dramatised through the formalised social rituals of Western society - the wedding and the funeral. Simms and Kirk’s photographs, created in the present-day fractured political context, reckoning with similar notions of privilege, particularly interrogating the gains and losses of a successful same-sex marriage plebiscite and a shamefully demoralising outcome to the Voice to Parliament referendum. The traces of the artist’s bodies in the landscape enact a poignant and cathartic narrative, illustrating like Boyd had, a search for love and legitimacy. 

Fragments of a larger movement-based performance produced within the landscape, this suite of photographs distils with dramatic lyricism the exchanges of power and vulnerability between two men. Within the ancient landscape of Yuin Country, by the riverbank and amongst the trees, Simms and Page employ the multivalent symbol of the veil. Here, it takes the form of a plastic sheet, its adornment evoking the various trauma-informed barriers to intimacy particular to the queer community. It obscures the artists’ reflection in the river, and trails behind them as they run away, encloses the lovers and then hangs like a wraith in the air after they have left the scene, suspended on the wooden frame. It inhibits between them the creation of true, reciprocal interaction and a respectful presence within the pristine landscape cleft by the meandering Shoalhaven river, under bright skies and in the inky darkness of night.

Presented alongside the suite of photographs is a group of recent figurative paintings by Simms, continuing his investigation into an homoerotic reframing of the classical male nude. Contorted and pushed to the edges of the picture plane, Simms’ figures are unbound and in a continual process of movement, as a gentle awakening of the static, statuesque male form. This push from classical contexts and the consumption of the idealised male form has been inspired by Simms engagement with experimental movement workshops, in which he contorts his body into unexpected forms in an abstract search of re-shaping. Painted with a restricted tonal palette, the focus of Simms’ aesthetic enquiry is in the creation of tension and vulnerability through tightly cropped compositions and dramatic chiaroscuro lighting. 

– Lucie Reeves-Smith

Essay by Vicki Van Hout

Michael Simms and Kirk Page, two bodies united through voice across cultures and mediums, navigating a relational trajectory in the topography of Country. Like a queen in tartan regalia propped against and distanced from a painted backdrop depicting her untamed dominion, the serenity of this wild is inversely separated by two ‘knaves’ sheathed in a blanket of clear polymer. 

Yet this is where the colonial portrait and this photographic essay depart. Whereas the images that inspired the genesis of this collection were heightened by a residency at the Arthur Boyd estate at Bundanon, by the man whose life's work speaks to humanitarian issues and universal themes of love, loss and shame, in rambunctious strokes of pigment upon canvas – the following images rendered in digital pixels capture, by the very nature of photography, an exposition of real-time intimacy, a specificity of vulnerability in closer proximity. Through political and personal reflection, a latent dialogue with Arthur Boyd’s Central Desert Bridal series of the 1950’s and 60’s emerged– not as a starting point but as a post-realised discovery. Where Boyd highlighted the unfortunate plight of the half-caste newlywed, Page and Simms aim to similarly call attention to the pitfalls of queer relationships against a backdrop of lingering heteronormative convention. 

This collection chronicles an emotive journey set very much in our contemporary context. The isolation of bushland is garishly juxtaposed by the tarpaulin which distorts the action on the other side of it, becoming somewhat of an allegory for a lens. Perception is warped, conjectures unfounded, truth held only by the players set on the stage – a boisterous coupling barely contained behind the fog generated by the initial burst of lust or a brewing quarrel? The heightened surreal hues burnt into the landscape by the Australian sun mirror-imaged in the water’s reflection, the refracted light a harbinger of promises and false positives. The plastic, a portent of inaccessibility, of inevitable solitude and trauma – exaggerates and magnifies little disturbances, until no plastic is needed to create the void of broken attachment. 

However, all is not lost. When this union of the painter in Michael Simms, who requires a clean image where the action is ambiguous yet uncluttered, unfettered by sidelines and unnecessary subtext, met in practice with the showmanship of Kirk Page who conversely invites the detritus into the frame, to muddy and misdirect conventionality, something more important transpired… in four years of collaboration, they forged a new songline. 

A romance in art making alone, Staged Theoretical is their first official ‘outing’ as contemporary arts collaborators. An exhibition realised through the development of a rigorous arts practice which involved a daily schedule beginning with a morning warm up, consisting of an exchange of tasks focusing on physical mobility. This was followed by improvisations with Michael filling the aural vacuum by playing piano, as Kirk vocalised, while similarly fleshing out the space with embodied riffs and jams in accompaniment. 

A second residency, the Gang Gang residencies program in Bermagui built upon their routine, to include perambulated wanderings to collect organic materials to fashion a frame of which they placed themselves within. This exhibition also shows drawings which compliment the sculptural nature of their collaborative output. Created through kinaesthetic engagement with the canvas exceeding mere inscription predicated upon the pincer grip handiwork with charcoal. In comparison to the photographic images which are representative of the journey to the place in which they have arrived, the drawings are embodied expressions of the willingness to harness their creative connection to continue working together in an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural capacity.

– Vicki Van Hout

Body Talk | Michael Simms

Flinders Lane Gallery 17 June - 5 July 2025

ESSAY by ELLI WALSH, 2025

Renowned for his deeply felt figurative paintings, Sydney artist Michael Simms engages with molten states of identity, masculinity and the body. Articulated with lively strokes of oil, his painted figures speak of perpendicular states, of the fluidity and fixity of self and our modulating relationship to our own corporeality. The body, for Simms, has always been in dialogue with something external – intertwined with digital technology, in isolation during pandemic, or moving through the expansive Australian landscape. Recently, however, the artist has turned inward to consider the body in alliance with the self, aiming to bring historical narratives into conversation with contemporary discourse.

Portraiture plays a foundational role in Simms’ practice, portraying artists who create live experiences, in an ongoing project called ‘Stages’. Increasingly, he’s personally venturing further into the realm of performance, blending and bending genres to create a new kind of body-based poetics. Simms’ new series, ‘Body Talk’, orbits the dynamics of embodied intelligence via deep considerations of performance, movement, and the body in space – and history. It builds on recent explorations of performance practices during residencies at Bundanon and Gang Gang and workshops at Critical Path where the artist engaged with choreographers and movement practitioners. “This changed the way I paint’”, he reflects, “generating images from a more physical and internal place”. Created through an experimental approach of automatism, the works investigate the kinaesthetic potential of the body and how this can shift, shatter and shape the image-making process. An increased awareness of how we move through space has enabled Simms to discover unexpected anatomical shapes and unconventional gestures that challenge historical narratives and traditional tropes of masculinity. “I'm curious about how the male body is so often depicted as being strong, heroic, dominant, fighting, in conflict...and what this unconsciously re-enforces about gender roles, the patriarchy and masculinity,” he explains.

Simms considers how this intersects with queer art, how hypermasculinity has been a form of protective armour to shield against discrimination and the perceptions of the queer body as ‘weak’. Partly inspired by the gritty boxing match artworks of George Bellows, as well the link between hubris and toxic masculinity in Ribera’s painting Ixion, Simms’ works look at how perceived ‘strength’ can handicap true intimacy. Delineating the body as strong and statuesque yet laced with vulnerability and softness, Simms questions what is strength versus weakness, what is liberating and what is oppressive. The body in many of these images is pushed up against the edges of the canvas, the frame a container that both stifles and protects. There is something cinematic here, not simply in the contorted expressiveness but in Simms’ lean palette, his subjects shrouded in chiaroscuro like stills from an intimate neo noir moment. Spectral figures recede into shadowy voids as much as they emerge, a tussle of revelation and concealment, dominance and passivity. There is a synecdochic relationship between these painted physiques, each part connecting as one embodied whole, one perpetual motion, as frames from a film reel.

Simms’ impressive brushwork evokes textiles, natural fibres and threads, weaving together the fabric of the body. Through automatic drawing, the artist has become aware of the possibilities of open mark making to communicate in a more physical way. You can feel the performance of paint here, the musculature of movement. Brush and body, mind and matter, are one. By carving open a space for chance within the tightly choreographed framework of figurative painting, the ephemeral nature of live performance is fossilised through the permanence – and performance – of oil paint. Simms’ gestural bodies are frozen in motion, the canvas like a thin sheet of ice barely able to contain their energy. They pulsate, they quiver, threatening to shatter the surface at any moment. His application of oil here is looser, more liberated, than previous series, the paint an extension of his own performative body as both artist and subject.

In these somatic snapshots, the body talks indeed. Sometimes loudly, with bold gestures and gravelly marks, yet often softly, in Simms’ subdued hues and silent shadows whispering of the profound power that dwells in vulnerability.

Memories and Dust
Catalogue essay by Kate McAuley, 2022

To immerse yourself in the art of Michael Simms is to enter into a deeply intimate exploration of the psychological and physiological aspects of the human condition, the misty haze of memory, and the way we exist in space and time. 

Drawing on personal circumstances and a complex family history, for Memories and Dust, Simms has revisited Broken Hill and its environs - a town and area that is saturated in meaning for the artist - to create both the thrilling yet sensitive body of work on display here.  

More interested in capturing a sense of feeling rather than place, Simms has imbued his canvases with profound emotion, often placing his own naked form within the landscape to great effect. In the most striking pieces, we see the artist thrown, flung and falling as he grapples with past histories and present isolation in beautiful yet hostile environments. They are a stark reminder of both the fragility and resilience of the mind and body. 

Elsewhere, Simms’ quieter works possess a childlike sensitivity. In the arresting Hold On, for example, the artist has depicted himself embracing a tree, a gesture that implies a need for parental protection, while in Vestige he’s featured besides the bones of an abandoned truck, staring into the middle distance with an air of youthful bewilderment. Simms also plays with scale, representing himself as both diminutive and monumental as he attempts to reconcile the mythologies of his family’s past with present day truths. 

Complimenting the figurative pieces, Simms’ landscapes are acutely hypnotic and gentler in quality. Oscillating between vibrant and muted tones, the paintings are dreamlike and impressionistic rather than wholly representational. In Quiet Lake II, tree trunks arch towards each other and branches embrace, creating a mood that is richly sensual though devoid of the human form. Equally inviting is the warmth and unique colours of the Australian outback Simms has harnessed in Umberumberka Reflections and Last Light at Umberumberka. 

The inclusion of derelict vintage cars and trucks must also be noted. Part allegory to the town that Broken Hill has become since its decline following the end of the mining boom in the 1990s as well as the ghosts of Simms’ own past that still haunt the region, both Crash and Wrecked invoke feelings of latter day glories and significant loss. The world that once was is no more, and perhaps never was what it seemed to be. 

With Memories and Dust, Simms continues to delve into his past through the lens of the present. Here is the soul and body of an artist completely exposed and in utter command of his skills and voice. He displays strength in vulnerability and a willingness to push himself towards the most challenging aspects of what it means to be human. The result is an alchemy of the enigmatic and intangible - a profoundly personal narrative that is relatable to us all. 

Michael Simms catalogue essay
By Steve Dow, 2020

Our personas can shift shape with technology and the needs of the moment. Returning to a North Sydney studio shared with other artists after weeks of pandemic-induced social isolation, Michael Simms is reinterpreting a Greek god legend through a dream-like modern filter of identities crafted online.

A jolting jack hammer and a child crying in the distance herald the sounds of a city returning to some form of normal after Covid-19’s first antipodean sweep. The model on some of the canvases here for Simms’s solo exhibition Drive is the artist, because life models were unavailable early in this physically distanced epoch. 

But the works are not about the artist per se: they are about the universal longing for human contact and the drive governing our cycles and repetitions of behaviours. 

This is art that plays with both positive creativity and our capacity for self-destruction. This tension is only heightened at a time the temptation to touch fellow human flesh is taboo, when the urge to hug, kiss and even shake hands is denied for its potentially fatal consequences.

Light and dark underscore this thematic duality; as a painter, Simms, 32, sees himself as a tonalist, with colour as a secondary concept. In one painting, multitudes of nude human figures collide with one another as they tumble down. 

“There’s a disconnect a lot of people have been feeling, just slightly missing each other,” Simms muses. “I still feel human interaction’s a bit weird at the moment. A misfire.”

He points to a painting which references Jupiter and Io, the 16th century Italian high renaissance painting by Antonio da Correggio, in which Jupiter, the god of the sky, shapeshifts to seduce his mortal lover Io. “Jupiter has got the guise of a cloud, to have some anonymity from his other lovers while seducing her,” says Simms.

“I found it really interesting to replace the idea of the cloud with a phone, and that online seduction being ethereal. You don’t really know who you’re talking to. I’ve had these strange experiences where you’re not sure if what’s going on is real.”

These new works grew out of Simms’s recent contributions to group exhibitions at Flinders Lane Gallery. Undercurrents, in 2018, explored the unconscious, and Simms’s paintings for that show also occupied the gap between online personas and real life situations, “the veil of anonymity that was a gateway for people to explore their unconscious desires”. 

The painting subjects were almost integrated with their smart phones – but alone, atomised, alienated, perhaps disassociated from their actions. In creating those works, Simms was working both instinctually and from experience of using online meeting apps to chat to other men. “I’d been through a relationship breakdown, and that was my access to the community at the time.”

The 2019 group exhibition Nude bore the fruit of Simms’s contemporaneous residency at the New York Academy of Art, an “amazing” experience for the artist that strengthened his interest in human form and anatomy.

Born in Adelaide in 1987, Simms’s introverted personality meant he spent a lot of time drawing while growing up in Flagstaff Hill. He had a speech impediment as a child, which would pique his growing interest in human behavior and the brain. 

A pivotal moment occurred when his year 10 art teacher – who also had a speech impediment and was the subject of jokes by Simms’s peers – assigned the class to create self-portraits. The teacher advised Simms to paint an idealised version of himself without acne, the common teenage rite of passage that was making Simms particularly self-conscious and reluctant to carry through the assignment.

Simms would later study psychology, gaining a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of behavioural science at Flinders University, before studying for his diploma of fine arts on scholarship at Sydney’s Julian Ashton Art School.

Today, he often paints portraits, such as singer Paul Capsis, actor Genevieve Lemon and author Thomas Keneally. So what does he do when a subject tells him they are self-conscious about a facial feature?

“I think that’s a real challenge because people see each other and themselves so subjectively,” he says. “How I see someone is probably very different from their self-image. But that’s why I like painting actors, particularly from the stage, because they’re very aware of their own image, so they’re perhaps not so precious about it.”

Actors’ tools of crafting an image sit neatly with Simms’s artistic interests in identity. “I want to know about their profession, how they get into a character and how it feels to be someone else on stage.” 

Music is an important inspiration for Simms. He plays piano, often the Romantic composers Chopin and Beethoven, and lately the “repetition and empathy” of Bach and the “ordered and mechanical but moving and emotional” works of Philip Glass. 

He also listens to “camp” pop music when painting. “If it was just silence I don’t think I’d be productive at all. I’d just be locked in my own thoughts, overthinking everything.”

Films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) are influences on Simms’s art, while the tone, colour and form of Swedish-born Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum and the surreal figures in US realist painter Vincent Desiderio are also sources of inspiration.

Dreams are obviously having an impact on Simms’s shapes and subjects. “When we went into lockdown, I think a lot of people had the same experience where they had really weird dreams,” he says.

“When I start writing them down it opens up this whole other world. One piece I’m planning for the exhibition is a figure that’s sleeping. It’s still an interesting gateway into the unconscious.”

Simms is working on a series of small, rougher, more experimental studies for the exhibition, part of a plan to curb his habit of overworking his art.

“Sometimes people have said to me, ‘It actually looks better a few steps before that, when it was still quite rough’,” he says. “Knowing where to finish something is one of hardest parts of the process for me.”

CATALOGUE ESSAY FOR ‘INTERFACING’ AT STANLEY STREET GALLERY

September 2018

On self-love and the digital - Brigid Hansen

The internet is obsessive; an intermedial space of creation, connection, formation, aggravation, pleasure, pain, remembrance, reiteration and discovery. Stanley Street represented artist Tom Christophersen and his internet-acquaintance-cum-collaborator Michael Simms are both a product of and a testament to the expressive, compulsive and collaborative artistic potential of digital friendships.  

An unseen aspect of a garment’s structure, interfacing is integral for moulding, strengthening and stiffening, giving the appearance of cohesion. From a computational perspective, the interface is the gateway to communication and the sharing of information. Cleverly taking into account these definitions and their respective contexts, the artists put forward the idea that a cohesive self is comprised of both digital and non-digital counterparts. Using selected figures from both of their own online connections, the artists explore the functionality of digital space and social media in their suite of paintings and drawings. Stylised realism both documents and imagines an intangible and ever-changing self-perception, often looking through physical and imagined screens to illustrate this notion.  

Christophersen and Simms’ collaborative long-form music-video-esque work builds upon these ideas in an engaging and tangible way, glitching between their faces and building a complex, aggravated and pixelated half-human. A strong sense of anxiety and the compartmentalised self is present here, with both artists conveying their respective insecurities - Simms exuding cords and reels of a tape and Christophersen becoming distantly entranced by his own pop-mantra.   

In Simms’ large-scale ‘Hostage’, delicate and smooth brush strokes combine with a clever use of ‘chiaroscuro’ - an historic painting technique in which contrast between light and dark is stark, illuminating and creating emotional tension. A figure - potentially the self - sits with arched-back and cloaked face, shining phone screen light into their crotch. Caution, restraint, anonymity and knowing are at play. Intentionally faceless and angled away from the viewer, Simms constructs an intimate portrayal of suffocation and shame and the mechanistic digital exchange of body parts.

Where the two artists paint the same figure, their iterations are complementary yet stylistically distinct. In TIFF #1 - 3, Christophersen uses a selfie as the basis for his 40x40cm glitched, woven-appearance watercolour and pencil triptych of friend and sitter Sophie. Simms takes the perspective of an onlooker in ‘IRL’, constructing a scene in which she is neither present in her digital device nor engaged with the painter or audience. Here light is played upon in technically strong and humorous ways which draw attention to the historical depiction of the female nude as virginal or angelic nymph. The light from Sophie’s iPad screen dramatically yet delicately illuminates her face in a calculated nod to the idea of a chosen self-representation. 

In Christophersen’s ‘Swipe Left’, a figure appears floating on rust-sheets in a candy-floss cloud of her own embodied narcissism. A series in which the sitter is viewed from above in various poses assumedly for her Tinder profile, the works present one perspective on the processes of editing, creating, re-evaluating and reflecting as core parts of the experience of online self-representation. When approached by internet friend Christophersen to sit for ‘Interfacing’, Ammy keenly accepted on the basis that she be represented nude and that she choose her poses in an effort to maintain consistent autonomy of her online activist presence in another’s representation.

Calling attention to our own viewing lenses or ‘screens’ through the mounting of works in perspex frames and lenticular-esque references within compositions, Christophersen and Simms’ ‘Interfacing’ is one thorough, conceptually rich and creative perspective on representing the self through the digital. Their undeniably queer sensibility and multi-layered technical skill brings us into a screen-based universe reminding us of the vulnerability and honesty needed to exist and maintain presence online. 

Both artists and all associated artists acknowledge that this exhibition takes place on stolen Gadigal lands of the Eora Nation

 nalist: Contemporary Art Awards 2017

On the Periphery

By Annette Ong

Australian painter Michael Simms (b.1987) creates work that is strikingly realistic. A finalist in the Contemporary Art Awards 2017, his painting Weight (2016) draws inspiration from American artist Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World (1948) and a recurring dream he had as a child. Upon viewing Wyeth’s painting, he recalled visions of himself crawling naked in a field attempting to reach shelter before sunset but instead plunged into darkness.

The painting pays homage to Wyeth’s original work but carries a distinct heaviness, expressed through the dark palette; an atmosphere of impending gloom. The placement of the subject in the foreground suggests his separation and longing, as he twists his body towards his destination in the far distance. There is a sense of urgency for the subject to return home to security and safety; yet, there is a significant divide for him to cross. His nakedness suggests exposure and vulnerability to the elements, both known and unknown. By referencing Wyeth’s composition and reflecting on his own memory, Simms work demonstrates that vulnerability is intrinsic to the human condition. 

Simms interest lies in the power of landscapes and their ability to shape our perspective and our place in the world. Another of Simms’s paintings Glimmer (2016), suggests the same desire by casting a similar mood. There is no painted subject in Glimmer (2016) but perhaps the viewer is cast as the subject — standing on the periphery looking towards a sky dense with darkness, interrupted only by a slice of warm light. The light between the darkness suggests an aspect of deliverance — transportation from the past or present into the future — to leave behind and move forward, towards hope and a sense of safety.

In both paintings, there is space to traverse: an unlit, unknown space. The landscape is vast, all-encompassing and all-consuming. Yet the use of light in both works indicates the possibility of change; that over time, what is threatening can become familiar when or if revealed by light. The connection between humans and the land is thousands of years old, and Simms’s work highlights this enduring relationship and its impact on our perspective. 

Weight (2016) and Glimmer (2016) comment on the variability of the natural world: a world, governed as it is, by forces that are at times, relenting at times relentless. The unpredictability of the environment works in conjunction with our own evolving personal perspective: both influence, alter and inform the other. 

Michael Simms is an award-winning artist based in Sydney. He studied Fine Art at the Julian Ashton Art School and has been awarded the Cliftons Sydney Art Prize (2016) and the Cambridge Studio Gallery Portrait Prize (2016). He has been a finalist in many art awards including the Blacktown Art Prize, the Calleen Art Award (2016), the Black Swan Prize for Portraiture (2016) and Contemporary Art Awards (2017).