Francesca Mollett

‘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.