Simon Olmetti

Tender Grounds (2026 – ongoing)





Tender Grounds is an ongoing series of embodied encounters exploring touch, intimacy and queer kinship through shared processes of making.

Working with charcoal on large sheets of paper placed on the ground, I invite participants — often other queer artists — to spend time together through gesture, gaze, breathing, holding and movement, with verbal communication suspended. Bodies press, roll and trace against the paper, leaving marks and impressions: sometimes visible, often barely there. Each encounter unfolds without a fixed script.

Often, these encounters end with a cyanotype, in which traces of contact and bodily presence are exposed through sunlight, introducing the sun itself as an additional more-than-human collaborator. 

I'm also developing paintings as a way of imagining other queer possibilities, a form of utopian dreaming in which bodies merge with one another and with vegetation, becoming entangled in new forms of intimacy, kinship and coexistence.

Together, these works explore tenderness, memory, desire and presence/absence through imprint, gesture and residue.