Welcome to the first First Friday of 2020. The visiting artist this month will be painter/printmaker Frances Gynn RWA invited by art.earth Director Julia Bond.  More information about Fran to follow.

Frances Gynn spent 20 years in graphic design and botanical illustration, obtaining a
BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Exeter University in 2000 after which she focused her attention on painting.

She describes her work as ‘Beach conversations’, responding to the coastline, where she lives.

Items that catch your eye, often because they are either not organic or appear so. It is from these strange attractors that she builds a narrative in her work. Her interest in suggestions of human presence within nature convey the inspiration through representation or abstraction, or both.

In 2016 she held a solo exhibition Frances Gynn, Paintings and Drawings Little Dartmouth, Devon.The culmination of work produced after an eighteen month residency was a site-specific response to the work of garden designer, Dan Pearson, landscaping on the coast from cultivated to wild.

From an exhibition, Hallsands Revisited, ghost nets are a central theme.‘Ghost nets’ are derelict fishing gear that has been lost, dumped or abandoned.The images are initially benign and sometimes ethereal, floating gracefully through the open sea. However, a more malign consequence becomes apparent.A perpetual moving killing zone, they are ubiquitous in our oceans and a major cause of plastic pollution.

‘Ghost Nets 4’ was awarded the Theresa Knowles Travel Bursary Award at the 2017 RWA Drawn open exhibition.

In 2018 she was awarded a fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy which brought about a new body of work on plastic pollution along the Ligurian coastline.

Work concerned with this enquiry has recently been exhibited at the Trinity Buoy Wharf (formerly Jerwood) Drawing Prize Exhibition, London, 2019 and 2020.

In 2019 she was elected Royal West of England (RWA) Academician

[main image: Frances Gynn: Hall Sands

 

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As usual we gather in the Garden Room at Dartington Space for a shared lunch at 1. Then we head elsewhere for our session with Fran, and will finish around about 3.30.

Do join us! All are welcome and there is no charge (other than for parking onsite if you drive)

Details are here if you need to know where to find us.

 

Frances Glyn: Ghost Nets 20