S A M    F R A N C I S

 



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MAKING / DOING / DRIFTING / SHIFTING


contact: samfrancisco5@hotmail.com


“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


RECENT STUFF

*People Came for Tea and Stayed Forever: solo exhibition, East Quay, Watchet, Jan-May 2024


*Come Walking Through: a series of text-based works for Promenade Weekender, Sept 2023

*Selkie Wife: 16mm film (digital transfer), screened at Cube Cinema, Bristol, Dec 2023 & Stone Club, London, June 2023

* Islanding: textual audio essay.  Part of the Broadcasting Intimacy aural exhibition at Spike Island, May 2023 +  aired on Radiophrenia - annual temporary art radio station, Aug 2023

*Earth Body: film screening & poetry reading at Art Earth Symposium, Dartington, June 2022

*Let the Idea Travel: solo exhibition, Arnolfini, Feb-May 2022

*A Year in the Life of a Field:
commissioned by Arnolfini, 2021

*Grow Feralcommissioned by Culture Weston, 2021

*Tapsew: performances at Supernormal, Cube, Strange Brew, Brunswick Club & release on TBC Editions & airplay on BBC Radio 3, 2019-2022

*High Tide: collaborative audio-visual work. Recipient of Interpreting Isolation grant from Sound and Music, 2020

*Ballad of Anchor Head Cove: collaborative audio work commissioned for Heritage Open Days, 2020


GRANTS & BURSARIES

*Arts Council England: Developing Your Creative Practice award, 2023

*Arts Council England: Project Grant for Promenade, 2023

*Flat Holm Island Research Trip, WEVAA Research & Development Bursary recipient, 2022

*SS go to Orkney travelogue, BEEF Bursary, 2019


*Glasgow International, A-N Go and See Bursary, 2016


CURATORIAL & PRODUCING

Freelance creative producer, curator, and programmer, with a background in experimental and multidisciplinary practices across visual arts, sound, music, film, performance and participation. Interested in collaboration between people, place and art forms. More recently developing place-based projects and excursions in the natural world. See projects for more info. 


EDUCATION

*MA Curating, Bristol UWE (2015)
*BA Fine Art Photography, University of Gloucestershire (2010)