“I’m sure that we’ve got everything wrong, and if we could go back, we’d see that we’re hallucinating.”
We met Francis Upritchard for a conversation about materials, working from your intuition, inspiration from sci-fi, dealing with climate change, and the hierarchy of scale within the art world.
Francis Upritchard works with figuration on human bodies, but not portraiture: “I try and embrace how incorrect memory can be. I’m working the material in reference to human bodies but remembered human bodies. And for me, it’s kind of important that they’re incorrect.”
Francis Upritchard works with many different materials, one of which is wild rubber. “Working with the rubber is certainly a chaotic process. It is so fast, and I cannot control things. I cannot at all make pieces look like each other.”
Working with wild rubber is impossible when creating large-scale sculptures alone: “With that big dinosaur next door, I had to work with five other people. I have to trust the people I’m working with and let myself be looser, and that really helps develop the work.”
Upritchard works with references to the past, as a visual commentary on how we make conclusions about the past in the present. She calls this act hallucination when talking about humans’ relationship to dinosaurs: “We find their bones, and we think we can work out what they look like, but I’m sure that we’ve got everything wrong, and if we could go back, we’d see that we’re hallucinating.”
Francis Upritchard (b. 1976) is a New Zealand-born artist. She was born in 1976 in New Plymouth and studied at the University of Canterbury before relocating to London in 1998.
She gained international recognition with her exhibition at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, where she represented New Zealand. Her works are included in prominent collections such as the Tate, the Saatchi Gallery, and the Hammer Museum.
Francis Upritchard was interviewed in connection with her exhibition Any Noise Annoys an Oyster by Astrid Agnes Hald at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in September 2024.
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced and edited by: Astrid Agnes Hald
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024.
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