Welcome to our Artist of the Season for Winter’s
Solo Exhibition
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My name is Frances Ann Norton and I am an art lecturer at a Northern University and PhD student investigating critical thinking/ critical making with art students. I am an interdisciplinary designer-maker working in the realm of decorative arts. I am also a writer-researcher, a musician and a poet.
My neurodivergence means I like to have many irons in the fire. I work cross-discipline, trans-media and give myself permission to work in a variety of methods, techniques and materials. I have a lot of energy for all my projects and friends and try and plan my free time to fit the most amount of exciting and interesting activities and people in it!
Life goals take me a really long time, years and years and that's part of my neurodiversity. Getting into university was a really long slog. I got there in the end. I worked in interdisciplinary design cultures across textile, ceramics, glass, animation, radio production and life drawing. This was definitely the best methodology for my working practices.
After I finished University I lived in rural America for 5 years and worked as a Potter’s Apprentice in Waxhaw North Carolina. This was a challenging and fantastic experience and it really broadened my horizons about what it's like to be a designer craftsperson working in the craft field doing lots of craft shows. It also showed me what I didn't want to do which was make the same thing over and over again for the next 20 years.
When I came back to the UK I divorced my husband got remarried and did a masters in ceramics. I used art as a therapeutic way of processing my experiences. I am a person of deep obsessions.
My love of all things Papua New Guinea begun at that time. As a theme, as an ethnographic interest in the religion, culture and artwork from Oceania and especially PNG. I explored in ceramic sculpture the figure and life drawing as a vehicle for narrative and story. I especially love transformational mythological tales which particularly capture my imagination. I researched parallels between PNG and Celtic/ pre Christian storytelling and myths around the cycle of life.
Family life and marriage brings up concepts of sustainability, community and ethics. I love being part of something bigger than just myself or just my family unit. Living in community is a long held dream. We are part of a Franciscan spirituality based community of around 200 people from around the UK. Being part of this community is a large part of my life and I see them as my extended family. Music, song writing and creativity are part of our charism. My art work reflects spirituality, family and always story telling. Having children is really a big part of who I am and the experience of having a child growing in me and be born out of my body is absolutely miraculous. This parked like a series of paintings and ceramic sculptures about the idea of birth and motherhood.
I've been working with process drawing for a good 10 years and it's something that I keep going back to. Within my artwork there are themes that I will return to in cyclical fashion. The Themes of the figure, the theme of the storyteller and the theme of abstraction and minimalism, of pattern, community. Process drawing/ process making is part of that. Process drawing is so calming, when things get overwhelming or too chaotic. It is something that I really engage with as a neurodivergant person. Using that repeated motif of running stitch/ dotted lines/ half square triangles in paintings/ quit making of half square triangles set in patterns of opposition to each other in lights and darks. I find that totally satisfying.
In my music I am drawn to white noise music of rain or the sea and really enjoy playing scales, arpeggios and finger exercises. At some point perhaps all these themes will intersect. I am attracted to the non-binary, the borderlands and being with people on the edge and at the bottom of so-called societal norms. These wonderful amazing ‘different’ people that I call family often flock to art schools, gigs and places of spiritual freedom. I am there too. Listening to stories.
I love collecting and I have so many different collections of objects. Russian Dolls, sea string, single shoe photos, single glove photos. One collections is of the different kinds of pottery patterns that you would find on cheap plates, working class pottery that you would find in the charity shop and just buying one of each. Having them in a massive collection and just laying them out on the floor and looking at them, photographing them, painting them, enjoying their togetherness.
The death of my parents set me on a track thinking about infinity, abstraction, pure colourfield work, the sublime, abstract expressionism. I went through a long phase of Gothic black. I threw out all my coloured clothes and charity shopped a whole new wardrobe of blackness. Outfits have never been so easy to put together, everything matched. It meant I had headspace to grieve in creativity. I painted putting together a mourning handkerchief series of drawing and stitched works on vintage hankies.
Recuperating from cancer treatment I painted in bed for months and begun in earnest my love of quilt block patterns and the serial work of the women’s Bauhaus weaving group and Anni Albers. I worked exclusively in half square triangles searching for patterns until I found the right one. Once I made that decision, it begun a three year stretch of work, working on this one pattern in repeat and echoing the materials of my mother’s jewellery making she was a designer crafts person and goldsmith. I painted in lapis lazuli and 24 ct gold.
“Icon painting brings together
my spirituality and my love of technique,
tradition, pattern, gold, typography,
storytelling and the figure with
symbolic objects. ”
Icon painting brings together my spirituality and my love of technique, tradition, pattern, gold, typography, storytelling and the figure with symbolic objects. Icon painting is a little like process drawing in that the model already exists, I seek to use my dream-state to paint the image, connected to something outside myself, an automatic painting almost. Working within a formula of hand gestures, geometry. A unique mixing of mineral, egg, water, gold, an alchemical process created through the medium of my spirit and a creator spirit, a joint project where I cannot say I am the author, but I can say that I consented to the process and was open to the universe.
In my painting, textiles, music, poetry I want to connect to people. My small story may ring a bell of understanding and recognition of your experience. We may share a conversation or thoughts on our similarities and differences, and that is beautiful too, that is also being alive.
“In my painting, textiles, music, poetry I want to connect to people. My small story may ring a bell of understanding and recognition of your experience. We may share a conversation or thoughts on our similarities and differences, and that is beautiful too, that is also being alive. ”
All art by Magical Women’s Artist of the Season (Winter) Frances Ann Norton
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