Coleman Project Space celebrates its 21st anniversary next year. We are proud to announce the start of our celebrations with Whorlbane, a solo exhibition by the gallery’s founder and director Frances Coleman.
The title of the exhibition has folkloric and anthropologic connotations, meaning fairy stone or hipbone. Frances has travelled extensively and this group of sculptures and works on paper offers a symbolic journey through a variety of geographies: from Scotland to Mexico, via London, her current home.
Collectively these works represent the artist’s interest in the physical traces found in and made upon the landscape as a result of cultural, religious and other human practices. And their innate physicality references the efforts required in committing to and discovering them. For the materials she chooses – wax, pigments – are associated with essential modes of expression that can be traced across the history of art and humankind.
Wax sculptures, watercolour paintings, photographic and neon works expand notions of the landscape as defined by the natural world and our colonisation of it. Carved, painted, captured and moulded they hold evidence of diverse cultural histories: from the discarded memorialised stones that might be found in a Scottish meadow and lost masks worn by children in a Mexican religious parade, to a hidden aperture of an ice grotto and the shape of light as signage.
All form part of the artist’s own pilgrimage through times and places, reflecting her role as observer of the things we leave behind and custodian of this unique artist-run space.
Frances is a B.A. Fine Art graduate of Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, and MFA graduate Slade School, UCL; recipient British Council Research Scholarship, San Carlos Academy, UNAM, Mexico DF. She has shown extensively in the UK and abroad, and lives and works in London.
Frances Coleman: Whorlbane press release
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