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Ilja Simons is a visual artist and cultural researcher whose work explores how cultural ideals are constructed through images. Working with archival photographs and botanical materials, she assembles collages that reveal how fragments of history, nature and representation combine to shape our understanding and imagination of femininity and identity.

 

By working with techniques historically associated with feminine craft, such as pressing flowers, Simons brings these practices into a contemporary artistic context. In doing so, she questions the ways in which practices associated with femininity have historically been categorised as decorative or marginal within art.

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These preserved botanical materials form the basis of her 'Botanical Assemblages', in which natural forms are arranged into carefully composed images. Her series 'Nature Morte', and 'Rehearsing the Ideal' examine how femininity is staged, framed and contained within visual culture. Drawing on archival imagery and botanical materials, her work reflects on how bodies are softened, styled and naturalised while remaining shaped by cultural expectations.

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Simons holds PhD from Tilburg University and an MSc in Sociology from Erasmus University Rotterdam. She works as a lecturer and researcher at Breda University of Applied Sciences, where her work focusses on narrative meaning-making, cultural bricolage and community formation in contexts of leisure, heritage and tourism. Her research examines how stories structure collective identity, whose voices are made visible, and how alternative narratives emerge through participatory and creative practices.

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Across both research and art, she investigates how coherence is constructed from fragments in social worlds as well as in images, drawing on a sociological perspective on the world.

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