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Painting (MA)

Francesca Mollett

Francesca Mollett, (b. 1991, Bristol) lives and works in London.

Francesca is the recipient of the Aidan Threlfall Award 2020 and will travel to Cornwall and Norfolk with the bursary. Recent exhibitions include A Fish You Have Already Caught, online/London (2020), The Weird and the Eerie, Hockney Gallery, RCA, London (2020), Sympathetic Magic, ZONA MISTA, London (2019) and solo exhibition Keyholes at Brockley Gardens, London (2019). She is half of collaboration ALBA with Ellie Dragone. 

Francesca has co-curated a number of shows, including Dust sheet embroidered snow, Project Gallery, Arundel (2019), The Value of Liveliness, White Crypt, London (2018), and Smoke gets in your eye, rural BAES, near Lewes (2018). Francesca co-ran and founded ‘The Benevolent Association of Excellent Solutions’, a set of artist studios and project space in Deptford from 2015 – 2016. She previously graduated from The Drawing Year, Royal Drawing School (2015) and BA Fine Art Painting, Wimbledon College of Arts (2014). Francesca will exhibit in an RCA group show at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in August 2020. 

Contact

francescamollett.com

___frangle

ALBA

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Degree Details

School of Arts & Humanities

Painting (MA)

‘She buried them in liquid ground, I knew I’d find them’. I hope to speak to and with voices that articulate a way of reimagining and reorienting ourselves to inhabit our locality. ‘Liquid ground’ is Luce Irigaray’s primordial soup, shifting and life-giving, that we need to ‘remember’, tread into its swampiness and attune to its potential to find a new subjectivity, entangled between our surroundings and our bodies. I want to consider the gestational in the act of painting: in making a film, I seek to translate entrancement, and make shifting positions of painter and viewer. 

Contemporary auto-fiction and streams of consciousness from literature are formative to how I perceive daily reality. Influenced by material feminists, I imagine the human intermingling with the more-than human as I paint, suggestive through corporeal marks, geological textures and meteorological transparencies. An 'embodied hydrocommons': how can I destabilise the boundary between body, water and landscape, begin to 'think with water' as I think with painting? A tiny pool at the bottom of the garden offers a connection to the cosmos, something wild and unruly, full of pollen, dry leaves, blown debris: stir it up, and it darkens, becomes opaque. 

I made leaky, supple organism-vessels to pull out from its marshy territories, images that attach to a matriarchal lineage of latex. The motion of luminous qualities of light on these objects, made for virtual content, better articulates my preoccupations with seduction, intimacy and metamorphosis than still pictures. Rather, paintings are lived with subject-objects reacting to day and night. 

Making paintings in the garden in lockdown altered levels of pace, control and distance, with light and weather affective like bodily energy. I layer and collage pictorial languages, my own drawings merging with the history of painting. Modernist and Sienese paintings inform my approach with their stylistic inventions that created a particular spatial orientation to a subject. Out of time and yet in time. 

I intend for marks to have agency, create their own edges, resist one another using oil and acrylic’s friction to create tense luminous surfaces. I’m absorbed by how paint acts on a surface. An experience of surface can be an experience of recognition, a drive to access inner reality, a place from which to share connective joy. 

Liquid Ground
Amber translucent latex is painted with iridescent and fluorescent pigments to amplify colour of reflections in the water and complicate distinctions between figure and ground; register a surface collapsing the virtual and real. Skin becomes water, latex becomes pond and the wind’s movement of tadpoles becomes the act of painting - directing matter that already has a life force. In a stream of consciousness, my voice, entwined with sounds of water, addresses the flints, a friend, the painting as ‘you’, drawing a line through, a metamorphosis between body and painting.

Medium:

Video

Size:

2 minutes 42 seconds
paintingVideo

Divers — Oil and acrylic on calico, 100 x 120cm, 2020

Seams of Marl — Oil and acrylic on calico, 100 x 120cm, 2020

Garden of Mouthings — Oil, acrylic and granite on calico, 120 x 100 cm, 2020

Maiden, Mother, Hag — Oil and acrylic on calico, 120 x 100 cm, 2020

Kiss of seedcake — Oil and acrylic on calico, 100 x 130 cm, 2020

Grotto — Oil and acrylic on calico, 100 x 130 cm, 2020

Solstice, 238 x 178cm, acrylic on calico

Solstice, SE15

Solstice: light marks a turning point, a step back or forwards? I’m disorientated. It’s a day early, a leap year. Before the virus, I’d planned to visit the Devils Jumps for midsummer; see the sunset line up with the path between the barrows. Instead, I start the painting on the floor. The lightest day of the year; the painting could feel like light. Collect its densities as an event moving through our house, the awareness of light’s passage, tones and motion heightened in lockdown. Often eerily golden, like in the photograph, it is a mask to outside conditions, concealing damage, a type of privilege.

I turn to solstice to look for other kinds of knowledge or histories, to feel connected to a communal spirit. The night before, I listen to Silvia Federici’s ‘Witches, Work and Womxn: Revolution from the Kitchen’ and find that in Denmark they still burn ‘witch dolls’ or ‘hexes’ on the bonfire around midsummer, partake in witch-burning; the erasure of female knowledges and powers, a strategy for capitalism; the taking of common land.

When it gets dark over that weekend, I watch the daylight horror ‘Midsommar’ over three evenings on my own, breaking up its power to disturb. Dani (in Midsommar) screams, and her grief is shouted back towards her, with her. She is noticed, held by many arms, her emotion becomes experienced as the collective emotion, a moment of healing in the tearing of everything else.

A few days later, we suspend the painting from the house. The painting appears to shift in its materiality. It has the potential to bring us together, but as the material becomes lighter, words make me heavy. Small stones attach to wire, gaffa-taped to pebbles - wind round the string and hold onto it. Distance between basement, road, window, leads to gaps, tense calls, the painting halfway between us.

Medium:

Acrylic on calico

Size:

238 x 178cm

In Collaboration with:

Grotto

Grotto (Detail)

Grotto (Detail II)

Grotto (Detail III)

Medium:

Oil and acrylic on calico

Size:

100 x 130cm

Seams Of Marl

Seams of Marl (Detail)

Medium:

Oil and acrylic on calico

Size:

100 x 120cm

Garden of Mouthings

Garden of Mouthings (Detail)

Medium:

Oil, acrylic and granite on calico

Size:

120 x 100cm

Kiss of seedcake

Kiss of seedcase (Detail)

Medium:

Oil and acrylic on calico

Size:

100 x 130cm

Maiden, Mother, Hag

Maiden, Mother, Hag (Detail)

Medium:

Oil and acrylic on calico

Size:

120 x 100 cm

Divers

Divers (Detail I)

Divers (Detail II)

Divers (Detail III)

Medium:

Oil and acrylic on calico

Size:

100 x 120cm

In Collaboration with:

V!O LLL . . A and YZ — Installation shot

ALBA is a collaboration between Ellie Dragone and Francesca Mollett that began in 2019. Bringing in distinctive qualities of each practice, we empower one another in our decisions, the dynamic of our conversations driving the growth of the pieces. Working in a scale that demands attention, each piece is an individual that has its own identity through the specific integration of painting and textiles, where original contexts of these disciplines are adopted by one another interchangeably. We vocalise an open-ended intention as a starting point for the work, creating a territory where limitations are formed and broken through improvisation. Ownership is liberated by using each other’s visual languages as tools to access and create a new material language.

Medium:

V!OLLL..A Acrylic paint, dust sheets, silk, canvas and cotton / YZ Found fabrics and acrylic paint on calico

Size:

V: 280cm (w) x 235cm (h), YZ: 305 (w) x 340cm (h)

In Collaboration with:

To be installed

Over the course of two days, ALBA will be making a new collaborative artwork in a front garden in SE15, using textiles and painting. People are invited to drop by and chat while we are making, and there will be existing works from the virtual show in and around the space. Check the website for more details.

Situationist RCA is a physical, pan-continental, temporary, see-it-in-the-flesh, blink-and-you’ll miss-it network of events, happenings and installations that will run during the course of RCA 2020.

Without our regular degree show interiors within which to present our artwork, you will be able to find us outside, in the parks, alleyways and skies of both London and beyond, the boundaries of our physical presence scattered globally.

The programme is loose, amorphous and active and can be viewed on our constantly updated website.

Medium:

Painting Event

In Collaboration with:

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