Lorraine Simms

Lorraine Simms’ practice is located in a form of contemporary interrogation and commentary upon nature. Animal forms have appeared in her paintings, drawings and sculptures for over twenty years. Her recent works explore our relationship to the natural world by highlighting the manner in which animals are represented within our society, over the long course of their depiction in still-life painting, as well as in terms of their posthumous collection and scientific understanding.

Her most recent body of work, Shadowland, was started and realized throughout and following her residency at the Museum of Natural History in New York, in the mammalogy department there. She employed the Museum’s collection of the bones and skins of endangered and extinct species to draw the projected shadows of these specimens. The resulting drawings, both accurately realized and manifestly abstracted at once, speak to the loss and empathy we experience, as she catalogues each individual both as such and as representative of their species.

Lorraine Simms has exhibited her work throughout Canada and the United States in a career spanning more than 30 years. Her paintings and drawings have been featured in institutional exhibitions in Canada and the United States, including the Canadian Museum of Nature (Ottawa, 2021-22), the Redpath Museum (Montreal, 2023), the Beaty Museum of Biodiversity (Vancouver, 2019) and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, 2018). Her work has been the subject of numerous reviews, poetry, and a television documentary. Simms has participated in numerous residencies, including the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams (2017), and the American Museum of Natural History in New York (2018, 2019), where she was granted privileged access to their private collections in order to begin her Shadowland series. In 2023, she continued her research in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Redpath Museum, both in Canada. Her work can be found in renowned corporate collections such as the Bank of Montreal, the National Bank of Canada and Loto-Québec, as well as in museum collections such as the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Canadian Museum of Nature. Simms has an MFA from Concordia University.