Quick hello Simone, can you tell a bit about yourself?
My name is Simone Löhndorf and I am a Johannesburg-born Swedish/German collagist, now living in Lund in the South of Sweden. I am also a cognitive linguist, and I was thrilled when I realized how my day job and my creative practice share the common theme of Meaning Making. The magic of how we create meaning with language and with visual elements in collage, respectively, is something that really excites me.
What are you doing/working on at this moment?
Since I just started a new day job, my time at the collage table has unfortunately been extremely limited the last couple of months. I’m trying to convince myself that some time off isn’t necessarily wasted time but can be time for processing and receiving new ideas. However, since I refuse to just drop everything to do with collage, I have a little sticker project going on. I made a little collage for peace and against violence, featuring a Martin Luther King quote and a peace sign made of flowers. I had the motive printed as vinyl stickers and am now asking people to help me spread it around the world.
I love street art and a little sticker slapping for peace is my tiny act of rebellion. (If anyone is interested in getting a sticker and putting it up in their town, please DM me on Instagram.).
What inspires you the most at this moment?
It feels like I can draw inspiration from almost anything. I’m an avid reader and passionate about literature and as a linguist, I love language, of course. My parents were both painters and I grew up among art & artists, and art & art books have become great sources of inspiration. Street art, music, the political happenings in our world – you name it. I do have to admit though, in the process of making a collage, I am only aware of being inspired by the materials I have right in front of me.
What’s your favorite personal work at this moment?
Oh, that’s a hard question if it is about my own work. I did two online residencies with the Kolaj institute last year, one to do with street art and one with political collage. I’d say that my street art collage ”My home is your home” and my concertina dealing with ”Dehumanization and Rehumanization” are the pieces I am most satisfied with. I think it shows that I put more time than usual into those pieces and that I really made an effort to use the residencies to develop my work. I do long for more time to immerse myself into developing both my collage composition skills on the structural level and my political messages on the content level. Four Kolaj residencies a year would probably do the trick, haha.
Any future plans/happenings you want to share?
I have lots of visions and long-time plans, but nothing concrete at the moment. I would love to create a small, printed collage book with a publisher like the lovely REDFOX PRESS in Ireland, but that’s still on a dream level. An even bigger project is a vision I have of a cultural history book illustrated with lots of art and with collages made of those artworks, in order to show the essence of the Zeitgeist described in each chapter. If – that makes sense. I hope to start working on that sometime soon AND I hope I get to finish it during my lifetime. It seems like a five-decade project. In the meantime, I’m happy to just get more time to cut and glue and maybe bring a collage here and there onto the streets.
Follow Simone on Instagram, @eclectic_tree_collage
