Simon Head walks a line between language, philosophy, and materiality; inhabiting territories of memory, translation, and reinvention. Head's propositions overlay systems and structures of the world; his art practice forms a personal duty to hold a measure to that world; 'A Continuous Project Altered Daily' to quote Robert Morris.

As a former draughtsman and typographic designer, Head has never been far from the processes of refinement inherent to the systems of measurement or the materiality of paper and film.

In principle, the project 'Untitled (Paper Sizes and Film Formats), 2023' represents this rigour; in practice Head employs the systems and methodology of the printing, machine drawing, and photographic industries to his own artistic ends. 

He says: "so many things from our industrial past prompt critical thought from us now, the term 'Imperial' paper sizes forever reminds us of the 'British Empire', which in turn registers its consequences; many traditional film plate sizes originate from a similar period but are memorialised fondly as they represent the absence and loss of traditional skill and labour scenarios."

The philosopher Vilém Flusser tells us that ‘the cultural condition is captured in the act of photography rather than in the object being photographed’, also that ‘images are significant surfaces, signifying mainly something out there in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions’.

Simon Head's ongoing project, 'Untitled (Paper Sizes and Film Formats), 2023' forms an abstracted series of gestural, hand-made, mechanical drawings, equally significant of surface and cultural condition.