Neon Parc

Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) was a political activist, a philosopher and a Christian mystic and both her writings and her life bear an extraordinary intensity and precision. She did not respect categories in either her life or her writing. A trained philosopher, she worked in a factory to enable her to actually understand and write about factory work. We see her as a very 20th century figure whose earliest writings engaged with workers’ struggles and the then European wars (Spanish Civil War, World War 2). She was a first principle’s thinker and while many of her ideas are completely at odds with contemporary life and thinking, her ideas are also the most acute critique of the myths and platitudes of now. Again and again, her ideas puncture the contemporary structuring myth of control – control of forces, both social and natural; control of one’s own destiny (meritocracy) – and explicate the horrified and violent response to those whose lives manifest a lack of control. Underlying all her thinking was a concern for justice. Her later writing engages with transcendence, the fragility of life, beauty and joy, the emptying of the self to enable attention to others and the world, and the mechanisms of gravity and grace.

She is perhaps best known for “The Iliad, A Poem of Force” (1939) and ‘Gravity and Grace” (1947), this latter book a not infrequent reference for artists and exhibitions. (As with Emily Dickinson, the writings comprising this book were posthumously collected and published.) For this project, we read all her writings and collected images of the original published political pamphlets. But ‘Simone Weil Project’ is not an archival project. We began with a very degraded internet image we found of Simone Weil with her eyes closed. To us, this image conveys interiority, processing the world through reflection, feeling and pausing, fragility and vulnerability and we screenprinted the image in a manner to remove, as much as we could, any overriding and limiting effect of an ‘historical’ image – it’s a face presented to the world. We also decided to repeat only this image of her face as we thought this would give the greatest intensity to the series.

In this work, we make a wager that we can use a word – Force, Thing, Void, Grace – to conjure an idea from Simone Weil’s thinking. And that we can select and combine these word/ideas, letters (Factory Journal) and publications in this print series to give and convey to the viewer a sense of both ‘our’ Simone Weil (her ideas and life experiences which are important to us) and how her ideas - Prestige, Attention, Obligation - can radiate out into the world to illuminate and delineate what is going on in the world. We think the series provokes feelings and thoughts and can work for the viewer without overt explanation of Simone Weil’s sometimes very abstruse ideas.

We worked closely with Trent Walter at Negative Press, Melbourne on the Simone Weil Project to achieve the final tone and tenor of the series.

—Jennifer McCamley and Janet Burchill, 2022