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Fran Richardson

Place of birth England
Country of residence United Kingdom

Central to the work is a fascination with the domestic, historic, and psychological spaces we inhabit as viewers. Our perceptual experience of these spaces can be fluid and unstable; the unexplained return of a past trauma can trigger complex psychological responses that are sometimes extreme and often contradictory. Intense feelings of anxiety, loss or despair can elicit fleeting moments of perceptual confusion that suddenly disrupt our experience of reality, undermining the present to cause a sense of uncertainty and disorientation. The work creates an alternative experience beyond the conventions of representation and the everyday that is closer to a disturbing reflection of the human psyche or the projection of an inner emotional state.

For the last four years the work has been dedicated to an investigation of monochromatic representational drawing resulting in the highly disciplined use of a consciously limited traditional material. Charcoal was selected because it is highly receptive to minor adjustment, permitting subtle gradations in tonal value from the pure white of the paper through to the dense black of the shadows. The velvety blackness is gradually built up though a labour intensive process of layering that carefully distributes deposits of charcoal on the paper, progressively eliminating the ground. Tonality is achieved by controlling the extent to which the texture of the paper shows through; in this sense the viewer is presented with the materiality of the surface as much as the image.

Group Shows

2008
Drawing Interiors, Bristol Drawing School, Bristol.
Forget Me, Gristle Mountain, Gosport.
Acquire, Aspex, Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth.
Romance, The Kowalsky Gallery at DACS, London.
London Art Fair, Business Design Centre, London.
Notting Heaven, Sartorial Contemporary Art, London.

2007
Group Show, Beverley Knowles Fine Art, London.
London Art Fair, Business Design Centre, London.

Exhibitions Forget Me, 13.Sep - 14.Sep.08, Fran Richardson, Acquire, 14.May - 13.Jul.08, Fran Richardson

News / reviews Garageland, Issue 6, Supernatural, Fran Richardson, , 01.May.08


www.franrichardson.co.uk

 

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