About Simon
Simon Youngleson’s sculptural work stems from his research as an award-winning architect. Explorations into how the human scale can create a sense of belonging and wellbeing in architecture and design inspired Simon to create sculptural forms to interpret his ideas.
He was intrigued by the scale and human proportion models in both Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Le Corbusier’s Modular, seeking to explore, convey, transform and create critical connections between humans and nature, and humans and the spaces they inhabit.
With further study and detailed calculations, Youngleson developed a mathematical model for the interconnected dimorphic relationship of the male and female form - his ‘Golden Scale of Human Proportion’. Youngleson’s sculptures are a quintessential expression of beauty and balance in the pentagonal geometry he discovered in the human form. His sculptures express a serene complexity, a clarity and an order, finding their power through universal concepts of repetition, symmetry, composition and scale.
A deeply reflective, conceptual thinker Simon Youngleson keenly appreciates that aesthetic judgement is fundamental to design, however most often exercised by designers intuitively. By contrast he has made it his life’s work to be informed and seeks to understand the ‘why’ behind his actions and decisions.
Growing up in the east coastal city of Durban in South Africa, Simon connected with nature from an early age, spending hours at the beach, in the sea – becoming an ardent surfer and fisherman, sleeping under the stars as a teenager listening to the wind and waves.
Youngleson graduated from the University of Natal in South Africa in 1987, and started his architectural life in Cape Town before relocating to Queenstown in New Zealand and later to Perth, Australia in 1998 where he lives and works.