This new body of work emerges from Simm's sustained practice of drawing – a process of feeling toward form before committing to paint. Research into the architectural drawings of Lina Bo Bardi and Louis Kahn provided an unexpected entry point. Simm found tenderness in their generative sketches – a quality of observation and care for form, she recognizes equally in the work of painters.
The same attentiveness shapes Simm's paintings. Small in scale and built up through layered brushwork, the hand remains visibly present throughout. An underpainting breaks through the surface in fragments, giving the works an inner luminosity, as though light is held within the paint rather than cast upon it. Geometric planes are held together by precise lines, creating a spacial logic that reads both as architectural elevation and abstract composition. The effect is intimate and considered, colour relationships that hum with quiet tension.
The exhibition carries a quieter architectural tribute. Marion Mahoney Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin's window designs hover as a structural influence - an homage to two visionaries who, as early as 1919, were developing affordable housing models in Australia. For Simm their legacy speaks to a core conviction: that the best ideas should be available to everyone. From this, windows become a recurring motif, thresholds of shelter, of looking out, and of being held by built form while remaining connected to the world beyond. The sphere enters the composition as orbit and energy, the circle without begining or end, functioning as a vehicle for color and tension.
Miss Modular takes its title from a 1997 Stereolab song - assembled from isolated studio fragments, musique concrète pop, walking the line between art and artifice. For Simm, it crystallises a figure: the woman thinker, designer, painter, operating freely within a given set of parameters. This exhibition is, in that sense, about women on task.
