Dionne Simpson (b. 1972)

Artist

Dionne Simpson was born in Jamaica, raised in Toronto, and studied art at Cooper Union in New York and OCADU in Toronto. She was the first national winner of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2004.

Simpson’s artistic practice is rooted in family histories and textile practices. Using a traditional African textile technique, she pulls threads from large canvases to create voids in the canvas. Into the spaces left behind she adds various paint pigments and found pigments including White Out and hair dye and then further destroys and embellishes the canvas.

Simpson has created works that vary from architectural depictions, such as the work presented here, to portraits and abstract images. She has described the canvas as a “metaphor for the underlying fabric of Canadian society” where she “embeds fragments of our culture inside the windows formed within the canvas.”