December 2023 – January 2024, Small House Gallery hosts two unique exhibitions by the artist and academic Susan Francis: #Sleepingsquad and Plastik Nature: The Harmony of Disagreeing Things.

In this post, we hone in on #Sleepingsquad for Small House Gallery One:

“The house is no longer the impenetrable fortress it once was, protecting us from the
excesses of the wider world outside the safety of our own four walls. Instead, it is a portal,
where the digital streams in through myriad electronic devices and we, in turn, share the
‘spaces of our intimacies’ as Bachelard once said, across social media platforms that reach
the farthest corners of the world.

“The #Sleepingsquad, a diverse group of lone users who stream a constant flow of online
video content from their own home, use their hashtag to signify that, while they may be
sleeping, their video screen never switches off, streaming every moment of their slumber to
the world wide web. As we moved into lockdown I began to meticulously draw these dark
thumbnails that appeared in my video streaming grid, a flash of light from a phone just
visible, the outline of a curved back beneath the covers, using drawing, an old and time
heavy technique, to translate the pixels into graphite, as they gently rose and fell on my
screen in line with their hosts breath.

“These ‘watchers’ from the walls looking out of their portals or frames to the
viewer. Both ‘night’ and the ‘house’ have been a preoccupation of my practice since undertaking
research into the subject funded by Arts Council England over a decade ago, and I see the house as a base from which our gaze looks out onto the world and the world in turn looks in. Its mystery and liminal spaces inspire much of my work and I am currently undertaking a practice-based PhD exploring this territory.”

BIO:

Born in Belfast and based in mainland UK, I have exhibited internationally in France, Spain, Poland, Canada and the USA, including residencies at The Bemis Centre for Contemporary Art in Omaha, USA and the Polish International Sculpture Centre. In addition to private collections, my work is held in the national collection of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and I am a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

STATEMENT

I make objects, installations, films and drawings that respond to a lived experience in a shifting culture of instability, fragmentation and change.

While these are often conceptually driven, creating quiet, poetic and at times unsettling artworks that interrogate the strange and the poignant embedded in the everyday, they may just as easily be materially driven, experimenting with the inhabition of material and object in space. They are however, often playful, at times irreverent, ridiculous or melancholic, raising the ordinary, the low culture and the stuff of the everyday to the significant.
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My inspiration can come from any manner of things that surround me, flower arranging books, dismembered doll parts, momentary experiences – treating the house as the centre point of this orbiting confluence, from which I look out onto the world. The digital disrupts this orbit, pouring in with imagery from myriad sources, make up videos, life coaches and online vloggers, mixing with the detritus to create fractured and unstable meanings. Subversions of scale often add to this disorientation, the miniature inviting the intimate, the small and childlike, intimating the wise and the numinous .

A recent master’s degree in theology, imagination and culture, has fuelled this interest in meaning making, the work touching on a quasi and incomplete belief system, concocted from a mix of memory, experience, and found imagery. The house, its electric collections, worn materials and liminal spaces however, is a base of familiarity I never move far from.

www.susanfrancis.com

Instagram: @susanefrancis