Trish Simonite

Trish Simonite teaches traditional and digital photography at Trinity University. Her still life and landscape photographs have been exhibited in group and solo shows in Europe and throughout the United States. Recent shows include: Photo SPIVA 2014, Spiva Center for the Arts, Joplin, Missouri; Imagined Realities; an on-line exhibition hosted by PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlesbury, Vermont; Electric Salon, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, in California, and Whimsical. Magical . Surreal at Anarte Gallery, San Antonio.  Her work has been published in books and magazines including An Introduction to the Art of Photography, by Katie Stern, published by Delmar Cengage, 2011; Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists, edited by Nan Cuba and Riley Robinson, Trinity University Press, 2008; A Creative Approach to Photography, by Harry Boyd, Heidelberg Publishers, Inc., 1974; d’ART International and Zoom Magazine.  Collections holding her work include: The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Photography Collection at the University of Texas in Austin; the Peter Palmquist Collection of Women Photographers, and the Women in Photography Archive, both at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; the San Antonio Museum of Art; and the Linda Pace Collection in San Antonio, Texas, as well as other public and privatecollections in the U.S. and abroad.  Today we share her series Beauty and Blood.

Rey Moro Landscape Seville Beauty and Blood

Beauty and Blood 

“The majority of my photographic series display my interest in the landscape and in nature. Born and raised in rural Norfolk, England, I moved to the United States and to Texas in the late 1960s. Much of my early work relates back to the East Anglian landscape of my youth, while my more recent work is concerned with the history of the landscape in England, Greece and most recently Spain.

This series of images were taken in Andalucía, Southern Spain during the summer of 2013. While there, I became fascinated with how remnants of the Moorish and Christian cultures hang like veils over this ancient landscape. Since we currently live in a time of conflict between radical Islam and the contemporary world, I wanted to explore how these two great civilizations coexist and can live peacefully together.

Arches Darkness and Light The Madonna and The Golden Dome Jesus and The Palace

Themes that are repeated throughout my work deal with issues of time, history, and memory. I have always been drawn to sites that have an aura of the past. Informed by Buddhist philosophy, I often capture elements that suggest the symbiotic coexistence of the conscious and the unconscious, permanence and transience. My photographs speak to the duality of human experience by presenting the world as a complex mélange of objects and ideas where unlikely juxtapositions and the past and the present coexist.

My work is rooted in and refers to traditional photographic practice, but I use contemporary tools to capture and create the images.”

La Mezquita Seville Madonna Paradise and PleasureCruces The Madonna and the Bull Ring Jerez  Antequerra Andalucia

To view more of Simonite’s work, please visit her website