Featured image: Romeo and Juliet 52 53, Albert Simkins, 2024, cyanotype on paper, 7 x 10 in. / 17.78 x 25.4 cm.
Albert Simkins transforms found printed materials into layered contemporary artworks that investigate memory, communication, and the evolving relationship between image and text.Â
Albert Simkins is a contemporary artist who transforms books, photographs, and printmaking processes into layered works exploring memory, history, and visual perception.
Working across photography, cyanotype, and mixed-media processes, Simkins obscures, fragments, and reconstructs familiar pages, allowing forgotten books and printed knowledge to become new visual experiences. Old Science Book 14, Last of the Mohicans 93, and Toxic and Hazardous C explore how information changes through time, revealing the beauty that emerges when history, abstraction, and artistic intervention intersect.
Old Science Book 14, Albert Simkins, 2026, photography, 16 x 10 in. / 40.64 x 25.4 cm.
Old Science Book 14 reimagines a vintage science textbook through layered photography and painterly intervention. Familiar educational illustrations of weather, landscapes, and industry remain partially visible beneath translucent geometric forms, inviting viewers to reconsider how knowledge is presented and remembered. Simkins balances representation with abstraction, allowing fragments of diagrams and printed text to coexist with expressive color fields. The work becomes both an archive and a reinterpretation, suggesting that scientific understanding is never static but continually reshaped by new perspectives and cultural contexts. The composition's layered transparency creates visual depth while emphasizing the fragile relationship between information and memory.
Last of the Mohicans 93, Albert Simkins, 2024, cyanotype on paper, 8 x 7 in. / 20.32 x 17.78 cm.
In Last of the Mohicans 93, Simkins employs the cyanotype process to transform a historic book page into a striking meditation on presence and absence. The rich Prussian blue surface is interrupted by the silhouette of a standing figure, while the surrounding printed text fades into the background. Rather than illustrating the novel itself, the work reflects on the act of reading and the persistence of cultural narratives over time. The cyanotype's photographic origins reinforce themes of preservation and loss, while the simplified silhouette encourages viewers to project their own interpretations onto the figure. The result is a quiet but powerful dialogue between literature, memory, and material process.
Toxic and Hazardous C, Albert Simkins, 2026, photography, 10 x 14 in. / 25.4 x 35.56 cm.
Toxic and Hazardous C embraces abstraction through overlapping cyanotype forms that sweep across the pages of a found publication. Dynamic loops and intersecting lines obscure much of the underlying text, transforming written language into rhythm and movement. Rather than erasing information entirely, Simkins allows fragments of the original page to remain visible, creating tension between communication and concealment. The title introduces associations with danger and environmental concern, while the energetic composition suggests the unpredictable movement of industrial systems, chemical reactions, or invisible networks. The work highlights how visual language can communicate emotion and complexity even when literal meaning becomes fragmented.
Across Old Science Book 14, Last of the Mohicans 93, and Toxic and Hazardous C, Albert Simkins demonstrates how books, photographs, and printmaking processes can become vehicles for contemporary artistic exploration. By layering abstraction over historical texts and images, he transforms familiar sources into thoughtful investigations of memory, knowledge, and perception. Together, these works reveal that meaning is never fixed; instead, it evolves through time, material, and the viewer's own engagement with the artwork.
Magnified, Albert Simkins, 2023, cyanotype on water color, 2.25 x 2.25 in. / 5.71 x 5.71 cm.