Practice
Direct work en plein air is central to Frances’ site-responsive practice. Her Dorset studio home-ground is fringed by sea. Imagery emerges out of a relationship between the stuff of place and all she brings to it. The works acknowledge the permanent impermanence in experience.
‘Each site I elect to collaborate with suggests and provides pigments and tools.
I linger, forage and concoct.
Weather, water and happenstance animate, they reveal and conceal, pre-vent and pro-vide.
Site materials enter and inhabit the work both by chance and by design.
Colour of sky, leaf and sea shift second by second.
My ‘materials bank’ alters hourly, daily, yearly and over millennia.
Phthalo seeps into Sandsfoot clay.
News from the studio
The studio has become a private space this year: playground and depository. One day soon it will open its doors. Conversations will resume. Visitors will actually ‘meet’ the works and me their maker once again. How welcome that contact will be.
This new website (and all the connectivity that is embedded within it) is an acknowledgement of the value of virtual connection. During these solitary months I uncovered much opportunity and gift via my screen.
Thankfully, I have not been distanced from the environment. I’ve never been so intimately aware of my place within the community of ‘other-than-human’ relationships. I’ve made a lot of work this year- and I’ve done a lot of listening.
Settling down by the waters’ edge in anticipation of a moonrise is like turning up to resume a conversation that began way back before I was a child.