“that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own
accidents, its habits, its breath, its name” - Alice Meynell
“Sam Francis does not make work about an engagement with the natural environment so much as she investigates the slippage of language, the meaning in between meanings which have been attached to the outdoors. In conversation, the written textual form, and via field recordings, photography, film, print and fabric, she is all about the drift, the unintentional discoveries of the explorer who is deliberately and joyously lost. For her there is little difference between the remnant wild flower meadow, the weed-cracked concrete of our post industrial landscapes, and musty archival box. And no different perhaps between the dust between brittle documents and the garden soil under her fingernails.
From herein tired colonial notions of psychogeography are rejected and that abrasive masculine ordering is replaced with something like Jouissance; that almost resistant to translation understanding of female giving, intimacy, hospitality, generosity. In the trips and forays the reader, listener, and the viewer make with her, nobody is made to feel unwelcome or outside of any given landscape, instead all are invited to piece nature together from the small intimate clues which our host and guide provides.
Articulated through small vignettes, interwoven narratives, summoned words, collected sounds, discrete interventions, and, yes, gathered berries, twigs and leaves, what is suggested is a spirit of place which far from being a definite surveyed and measured destination, a pinprick or circle on an OS map, is a location in flux that provides yet another point of departure, questioning, and healthy uncertainty.” - Sean Prentice
