penny simons
artist
FREWEN AWEN is the collaborative name/ work of Penny Simons and Hobart Hughes.
Their installations combine earthly botanical sculptures, instinctive pattern-making, and surreal audio-visuals. Their work is embodied through a synthesis of pattern, form, concept and dream. They create places where the fundamentals of our perceptions, collective unconscious and ancestry well up and take form. Optical, performative and immersive, their installations delight and question our senses in equal measure.
Cementa26 Arts Festival
Kandos NSW
17-20th September 2026
RECALL 1-7
A series of installations by Frewen Awen:
Penny Simons and Hobart Hughes
The critically endangered Regent honeyeater birds, are now so rare they have forgotten their songs and begun singing the songs of other birds. However in a clever intervention, ornithologists have begun playing recordings of their calls back to them, in the hope they will begin to recall them.
In “Recall 1-7” this same bird song is the soundtrack and metaphor to the suite of installation works.
Just as the Regent honeyeater bird has lost it’s way by forgetting it’s song, we too have lost our way…
This work asks us to recall not just our recent past but how we used to live, before we lost our songs of connection to our ancestors, to the luna and solar cycles and indeed to the resonance of the land itself.
The Recall series of 7 installations, invites us into the habitats of Kandos, where the houses, burrows, vessels and vortex are seen as one ecosystem, where they nurture, heal and hold one another collectively.
The work is an invitation to relearn how to take up the mantle of care, kindness and responsibility within which our cultures, systems, and planet depend on.
Penny Simons
We occupy a time of profound danger, but it is also charged with immense potential. Only a couple of generations back—we were far more resourceful and independent. We sourced most of our own food, transport, and entertained ourselves through a rich, grassroots culture. However the wave of settlement also inflicted deep harm upon this land and it’s people.
Moving forward requires knowing which traditions to absorb and which to avoid. We can imagine and create a new culture that resonates with the ground, tapping into a landscape that is vibrant with energy and abundance. This is a time for genuine sharing. By looking with generosity and love to the traditional custodians of this place, we can merge their deep connection to Country with the matching insights into the reality that consciousness is embedded into all matter, and indeed space itself.
Hobart Hughes
Galway Ireland June 2025
A 1 month collaborative art residency at Watershed Studios in Galway, with Hobart Hughes.
Creating a large installation, and performing artwork. Created around themes of ecological stewardship of the land and narrative landscaping.
For fly thru of the making of the installation and subsequent performance see utube link:s h
Kioloa, South Coast NSW Oct. 2024
A 1 week collaborative self created art residency with Hobart Hughes. The retreat mission was to create a narrative landscape installation to use for European art residency applications in Ireland and Iceland.
North Sydney Art Prize
May 2024
Hurricane Fence
Installation
