‘Plastik Nature – a harmony of disagreeing things’ is Susan Francis’ (other) two month-long solo show running from December 2023 through January 2024. Plastik Nature is concurrently on display in Small House Two, next to with #Sleepingsquad, her other solo show in Small House Gallery One.
“Early 17th century Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth attempted to reconcile the rational, mechanical world of the Enlightenment with an inspired and spirit filled world of material and matter, naming his theory ‘Plastik Nature’ – the harmony of disagreeing things. The term, Plastik Nature, has a playful, superficial contemporary definition suggesting a complete incompatibility between the man made and the natural, whereas to Cudworth it spoke of a malleable world, moulded and shaped by a higher purpose. I like the ‘doublethink’ inherent in this wording.
“With this title as inspiration I draw on some of the dystopian worlds I have created in miniature dioramas in recent years, where discarded plastic objects, and found imagery have combined to suggest spaces of melancholy, where temporal shifts occur in both colour, object and design, suggesting at one time a futuristic setting, at another a past. Combinations are incongruous and surreal with the added distortion of magnifying sheets and used spectacle lenses suggesting liminal, shifting spaces and altered viewpoints.
“Cudworth’s view of the world may seem distorted and misplaced to some but his life’s task to write the ‘True Intellectual System of the Universe’ was admirable and ambitious. Drawing on medieval iconography, where the dismembered hand of God, the Manus Dei, (the body couldn’t be shown) hovers at the top of an artwork, the Small House Gallery has its own, in this case a child’s dismembered hand, bringing order to an otherwise chaotic world.
“Both of these exhibitions invite us to look, one at the intimate scenes from darkened interiors, the other at a miniature distorted world created from our personal detritus. To play with a dolls house is to take on the role of both creator and voyeur simultaneously., something most of us find irresistible.”
All photos (& video) above by the artist.
(More photos by the curator will follow after Christmas.)
SUSAN FRANCIS, 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.
ARTIST 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.
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.
Small House Gallery 
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