Frances Richardson: Still attached at all four corners

About

Bobinska Brownlee gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Frances Richardson.

Richardson’s eye is attracted to the disregarded, unwanted or overlooked of the everyday, finding rhythm in upturned pallets and piles of building waste, greeting moths each morning along her studio corridor or ushering the odd rogue winged visitor to her flat out into the night. 

In Still attached at all four corners, Richardson draws together what she calls the real and the phantom in sculptural images made from wood veneers and MDF.

The Rorschach-like pairings of burr wood veneers allude to the psyche and flights of fantasy.

In using the material to reveal a snapshot of multiple points in time, these ‘moths’, as Richardson calls them, appear to tentatively cling to the walls in a momentary pause. Their presence is counterbalanced by the utilitarian uniformity and timeless mundanity of mdf pallet structures, useless images of redundant carriers, anchored by gravity.  

Richardson says, “if I have to be pinned down to saying what the work is about…” - something that she resists - “… I could say the work is an allegory of transience. But I would prefer you to make up your own mind”.

Richardson has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Key solo shows include If I measure it must exist, Karsten Schubert London, 2021, Not even nothing can be free from ghosts, Standpoint Gallery, London 2018 and In times of brutal instability, Chiara Williams Contemporary Art, London Art Fair 2018.

She was the recipient of the Brian Robertson Award in 2021, the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award in 2017 and Chiara Williams Contemporary Art SOLO AWARD 2017. She was nominated for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2015-17 in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery.

Frances Richardson (born 1965, Leeds, UK) received her MA in Fine Art Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London in 2006.  Before this, she studied with master Yoruba carver Segun Faleye in Osogbo, Nigeria and completed her BA (Hons) Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and Design, Norwich. She is represented by Karsten Schubert.

Art writer and critic Elizabeth Fullerton has been commissioned to write a text about the exhibition, available from the gallery in September.