Less stale attachment
Simon Denny

Simon Denny’s installation Less Stale Attachment was first exhibited in 2006 at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. The installation was shown as part of a group exhibition called Break: Construct that invited nine emerging artists in the region to exhibit work around the ideas of experiential and environmental totality.  Drawing inspiration from the collaged environments of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters alongside Frederick Kiesler’s Galaxies, the exhibition examined how materials and their contexts are shaped by their quotidian environments. 

Less Stale Attachment marks a formative moment in Denny’s practice, shaped by a distinctive material-based approach. This early installation stands apart from the artist’s later work, which is more often associated with investigations into technology, politics, and systems of power.

Almost twenty years on, the installation accrues new associations that contribute to its material afterlife. In 2025, the rhetoric of “attachment” spans a semantic field that stretches from relationship self-help discourse to the digital file appended to an email. At its core, the work begins with the assembly and disassembly of our surroundings into forms that are comprehensible, experiential, or fantastical. The installations embodies a concern that is “conversational in nature” and that addresses how meaning and material intertwines.

At KIN, the exhibition is presented as a near-exact restaging of the 2006 installation at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Taking it back to its original form, scale, and sensibility, Denny reflects on the enduring questions that first emerged in his practice. 

From the 2006 exhibition catalogue: 

“There is a fluidity to Less stale attachment, a process of discovery that is in front of us. A precarious arrangement of wood, wool, plastics and paper gather as an articulation of form and material. Simon Denny uses these objects to divide the space, drawing attention to the material tactility, the way they sit. Each object is employed to speak of how it occupies a volume in relation to other parts, forming a community of structures that points us toward meanings that are conversational in nature.

How forms touch, and how they have been touched, whether in fragile or crude ways, faint or funny, is key. This is wet. Everything is wet. This is folded, everything is folded. Or it’s screwed up. Or it’s just up. This is falling, or rather, it would be falling if it wasn’t taped up here, propped up there. This one’s sloppy, it’s all pretty sloppy. With parts wrapping, holding, balancing and supporting, the work exists as an interdependent arrangement.The performative residue of the making process stresses the potentiality of the materials – the meeting of form, purpose and action.

Simon Denny’s practice emphasises relationships within communities of things—complex sculptural combinations of objects found, bought, gathered, and made. Denny presents his audiences with situations that foreground an engagement with associations of form, purpose, and action. The apparent crude modesty of form belies the poetic intelligence of the works’ coming-into-being and sculptural conceit. 

Denny’s art-making is rooted in doing: considerations of performance and acts of making that embed the artist’s gesture and activity into his objects—objects chosen, in the first instance, for the character and activity they already inhabit.”