Simone Stoll
Frankfurt,
Germany
Born 1967 in Frankfurt, Germany, Simone has lived in Berlin, London, Reykjavik, and Marseilles and presently resides wherever life takes her. Simone works in series, taking inspiration from her research on the body and mind. Over the last several years, she has concentrated on her drawing and has further explored the mediums of photography and video. Recently, her work has become increasingly more intimate and daring. She has collaborated with numerous artists and neuroscientists and has created works in public spaces. Simone’s work has been exhibited in Germany, England, Sweden, Iceland, France, Belgium, Canada, and the USA and is represented in both public and private collections. Simone began her studies in West Berlin, where she was also part of a feminist activist group. She continued her studies in Theatre Design at London College of Fashion and completed them with the Advanced Theatre Design Course at Central School of Speech, Drama, & the Visual Arts in 1994. In London, she co-founded an alternative multi-disciplinary arts center and ran the performance/life art section. In 1994 she accepted an invitation from the Museum of Art Reyjavik to do a 5-month residency in Iceland. There, her paintings gained the notion of space and time. A year later she was invited to take a studio at an art center situated within a psychiatric hospital in Aix-en-Provence, France, where she worked for two years. Finally, the figure regained its presence in large paintings. In 1996, she was given the art prize, Culture Entreprise, and in the following years completed numerous art projects in the region, both collaborative and personal. From 2001 to 2002 she was invited by the Akademie der Kuenste Berlin for a one-year residency. There, she collaborated with a fundamental research lab in neuroscience at the Max-Delbrueck Centre for Molecular Medicine, which led to Big Live Kinetic Profiles, a series of charcoal drawings and also a multi-media installation in collaboration with H. Nahon, ATP. Simone continued her research in neuroscience and served as an artist-in-residence for over two years at a fundamental research lab in Marseilles. In 2006 she completed a book with editor La Fabrique Sensible on her series of ink drawings Softbodies-extra. With this series her work began to take a more intimate approach. The same year Simone received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Feminist Artist Statement
#1 (hottest pink), a recent video, shows a close-up on hands varnishing toenails. The camera is fixed and frontal. This intimate moment of (female) beauty care reveals body and body culture, but foremost, a mental state. The slow and repetitive act turns into excessiveness, beautification, self-violation. The onlooker becomes witness of this private moment, of one’s open and raw state of being; becomes aware of fragility that lies within our existence. Body and mind are interwoven in all my works, whether in painting, drawing, photo, or video. My first paintings showed naked women in urban landscapes, screaming out their pleasure and pain, confrontational, stripped naked, sexual, and provocative. There is a certain energy and boldness that has been lost within the course of becoming an artist, and a feminine side that has given way to abstraction. My work is based on the human, nourished by neuroscience, socio-cultural studies, and the arts. I seek to keep my means simple and direct and base my ideas on my experience, my intimate understanding, mind, and sensuality. I always use my own body as a model and performer. The feminist approach is part of my general understanding, a constant re-questioning. Living in different countries taught me to see and to think in all kinds of ways. Within different societies, I have been confronted with variations of feminist understanding and society’s general attitude towards feminism. Adaptation is a learning process involving shoveling in the new and burying the old until the latter seeps back through and asks to be reconsidered. I reconsidered. Softbodies-extra, a series of ink drawings, grew out of the need for finding shapes that convey the conception of life. They grew from a single shape into two, parted or melted into one another. This work had been influenced by microscopic imagery where bodies are being discovered in layers, each a possible reality. They evolved into labia-like shapes, a sensual understanding of female body. My research on body and life could no longer be separated from sexuality; my work became increasingly more sensual and erotic, raw and cruel. There was also a need for the ‘real’ body image beginning with the body-prints Loveletters, leading to photography and video. These pieces are poetic and tender, cruel and raw. They allow me a direct confrontation with the public mirroring mental states of being and expressing longing, solitude, sensuality, desire, despair, destruction, hope, and love.
Softbodies-extra
Finding shapes that convey the conception of life, like a cell with its membrane—its transitions and its fragility—was the initial idea of Softbodies some years ago. They grew from a single shape into two, parted or melted into one another. Lines define inner and outer. Fluid gives mass and free flowing form. In microscopy one discovers bodies in layers and versions; surfaces become visible or blur into the mass. I felt a need to come closer to that invented body. They became blotchy and hairy, grew from slices to full bodies. The hair builds a fur-like cover and protects, but it is an attractor at the same time with tentacles caressing the air, a promise to caress. Softbodies-extra is the interim result of a search for sensuality and self-awareness. The human is seen as it may be, raw and fragile, given a shape inspired by the female sex. The body opens, receives, and gives way to the inside. I seek to create images of this state of being receptive, of the consciousness of the inner and the outer body, of the flow of giving and taking. Simone Stoll excerpt from ‘Body’, ‘Simone Stoll, softbodies-extra’ Edition la fabrique sensible, Marseilles, January 2006
Softbodies-extra
Finding shapes that convey the conception of life, like a cell with its membrane—its transitions and its fragility—was the initial idea of Softbodies some years ago. They grew from a single shape into two, parted or melted into one another. Lines define inner and outer. Fluid gives mass and free flowing form. In microscopy one discovers bodies in layers and versions; surfaces become visible or blur into the mass. I felt a need to come closer to that invented body. They became blotchy and hairy, grew from slices to full bodies. The hair builds a fur-like cover and protects, but it is an attractor at the same time with tentacles caressing the air, a promise to caress. Softbodies-extra is the interim result of a search for sensuality and self-awareness. The human is seen as it may be, raw and fragile, given a shape inspired by the female sex. The body opens, receives, and gives way to the inside. I seek to create images of this state of being receptive, of the consciousness of the inner and the outer body, of the flow of giving and taking. Simone Stoll excerpt from ‘Body’, ‘Simone Stoll, softbodies-extra’ Edition la fabrique sensible, Marseilles, January 2006
Softbodies-extra
Finding shapes that convey the conception of life, like a cell with its membrane—its transitions and its fragility—was the initial idea of Softbodies some years ago. They grew from a single shape into two, parted or melted into one another. Lines define inner and outer. Fluid gives mass and free flowing form. In microscopy one discovers bodies in layers and versions; surfaces become visible or blur into the mass. I felt a need to come closer to that invented body. They became blotchy and hairy, grew from slices to full bodies. The hair builds a fur-like cover and protects, but it is an attractor at the same time with tentacles caressing the air, a promise to caress. Softbodies-extra is the interim result of a search for sensuality and self-awareness. The human is seen as it may be, raw and fragile, given a shape inspired by the female sex. The body opens, receives, and gives way to the inside. I seek to create images of this state of being receptive, of the consciousness of the inner and the outer body, of the flow of giving and taking. Simone Stoll excerpt from ‘Body’, ‘Simone Stoll, softbodies-extra’ Edition la fabrique sensible, Marseilles, January 2006
Softbodies-extra (detail)
Finding shapes that convey the conception of life, like a cell with its membrane—its transitions and its fragility—was the initial idea of Softbodies some years ago. They grew from a single shape into two, parted or melted into one another. Lines define inner and outer. Fluid gives mass and free flowing form. In microscopy one discovers bodies in layers and versions; surfaces become visible or blur into the mass. I felt a need to come closer to that invented body. They became blotchy and hairy, grew from slices to full bodies. The hair builds a fur-like cover and protects, but it is an attractor at the same time with tentacles caressing the air, a promise to caress. Softbodies-extra is the interim result of a search for sensuality and self-awareness. The human is seen as it may be, raw and fragile, given a shape inspired by the female sex. The body opens, receives, and gives way to the inside. I seek to create images of this state of being receptive, of the consciousness of the inner and the outer body, of the flow of giving and taking. Simone Stoll excerpt from ‘Body’, ‘Simone Stoll, softbodies-extra’ Edition la fabrique sensible, Marseilles, January 2006
Loveletters
The series Loveletters was created out of a need for reality of body, the female sex. After having worked on the imaginary internalized image of the female sensual body within the series of ink drawings Softbodies-extra, I began researching imagery of the outer, hidden, but visible part of female body. In the Loveletters we behold the act of coloring the labia with lipstick and then in one unique moment, pressing the sex onto a piece of paper, sometimes strongly to reveal inner mucus, and other times softly, like a caress. Some reveal fine traces of pubic hair. Later, it is entirely shaved off leaving the bare and organic texture of skin. Body hair and now also pubic hair plays an important part in body fashion and ideas of beauty, which has gone through drastic change within the last years in Western societies. A generalized ideal of beauty, even for the female sex, has now introduced beauty surgery to standardize labia. Those Loveletters are intimate moments shared, my own body in various states of being. The intimate fragile body reveals our mental state of being, arousal, retraction, openness, protection, strength, and vulnerability.
Loveletters
The series Loveletters was created out of a need for reality of body, the female sex. After having worked on the imaginary internalized image of the female sensual body within the series of ink drawings Softbodies-extra, I began researching imagery of the outer, hidden, but visible part of female body. In the Loveletters we behold the act of coloring the labia with lipstick and then in one unique moment, pressing the sex onto a piece of paper, sometimes strongly to reveal inner mucus, and other times softly, like a caress. Some reveal fine traces of pubic hair. Later, it is entirely shaved off leaving the bare and organic texture of skin. Body hair and now also pubic hair plays an important part in body fashion and ideas of beauty, which has gone through drastic change within the last years in Western societies. A generalized ideal of beauty, even for the female sex, has now introduced beauty surgery to standardize labia. Those Loveletters are intimate moments shared, my own body in various states of being. The intimate fragile body reveals our mental state of being, arousal, retraction, openness, protection, strength, and vulnerability.
Kiss Me
Kiss Me is a series of photographs and a short animation video.
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