While recovering from a injury, Simonetti found herself unable to make sculpture; a period the artist refers to as the “Dark Ages". Estranged from her body, she turned to painting in private—initially depicting sculptures that she was unable to make. Over time a distinct body of work emerged, establishing a new material channel in her practice. 

The exhibition’s title, I'm Already an Actor, originated as an intrusive thought Simonetti had when she began painting. Incomplete and potentially defensive, its meaning was initially elusive. In her sculpture, Simonetti uses the bunny form to interrogate anthropomorphisation, but as this motif migrates into two dimensions, she uses the animal to animate emotion, implicating herself within her own framework. Simonetti’s installation work often engages with how security is negotiated in public space, whereas in painting, that vulnerability enters first person. The phrase also alludes to her performance of identity as an artist—a concept she confronted during the “Dark Ages” as her self-perception as a sculptor dissolved with her physical abilities. 

Broadly, Simonetti’s work engages with animals that have been processed through human systems of meaning, along a spectrum from anthropomorphised to objectified. Held simultaneously, these lenses negate each other while pointing to an absence at the centre: the actual animal. As a cultural object, the bunny has been thoroughly metabolized. Divorced from specificity, it becomes an empty and infinitely flexible vessel. This logic manifests formally in her paintings, where bunny shapes recur with subtle variation, and break down into abstraction. Blocks of colour are separated by thin lines, like solder around panels of stained glass. Made with no source material aside from her previous paintings, the artist creates a self-referential and autopoietic vocabulary.