WEEK #2
WENDY MCLEAN & FRANCESCA MOLLETT
Wendy McLean and Francesca Mollett both participated in our 2018 group exhibition, The Value of Liveliness, which explored the notion of liveliness through abstraction and the relationship between the viewer and the artist’s labour.
The full exhibition webpage is viewable here.
All artworks are available to purchase. Should you wish to make an enquiry please email maddie@whitecrypt.com or anais@whitecrypt.com
WENDY MCLEAN
Wendy McLean’s practice considers painting’s relationship to vision and the sensation of inhabiting different spaces. McLean is interested in slowing down and paying attention to the close at hand; objects, architectures, ground, habit and the body. She repeated works with the same motif in an attempt to open up and then exhaust the initial form they stem from. The paintings are light with thin stains of paint, predominantly tonally close and painted on cotton. They share some dense areas, curves, abbreviated and notational blocks of colour suggesting movement and space. Whilst each work is unique in form and colour, it is hoped that a commonality emerges between works. The series of ‘Pits’ paintings dwell on repetition both within and between paintings. The title is consciously ambiguous: there is a parallel between its openness and the openness of the painted forms in relation to their figurative root. The word pit also suggests a hollow or container; the absence of something unknown.
Speaking about how events of recent months have affected her practice, McLean explains:
At the start of this year, before corona took hold in the UK and daily life looked so different, my friend, the painter Linda Hemmersbach, and I organised an exhibition ‘The Continuous Image at Oceans Apart’ in Salford. Evolving very quickly, it was a way to think through open questions in ours and other painter’s practices: how painted objects sit with each other, communicate in pairs and groups, and suggest sensations and spaces outside of themselves.
Many of these curiosities have stayed with me in the months since (they’ve been there years before and I’m sure will carry on for many more!). Over the last few months I’ve been making lots more paper work, something I’ve often found a freeing way to work though thoughts quickly. The work has taken a more emphatically figurative turn for the time being. They are also part of an ongoing postal collaboration with Irish artist and poet Ciara Healy, bouncing back and forth papery words and drawings, meditating on journeys and memory in the landscape and its dwellings.’
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wendymcleanartist.com
@wendy_ mclean_
Wendy McLean (born. 1985, Kent, UK) lives and works in Surrey, UK.
She is an artist and educator who received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2011) and a BA in Fine Art from London Metropolitan University (2008). Recent exhibitions include: ‘The Continuous Image’, Oceans Apart, Salford; ‘A Hand Stuffed Mattress’, Terrace Gallery, London; ‘A Riotous Assembly’, Déda, Derby; a two person exhibition with Sandra Lane and Square Art Projects, at Swab, Barcelona; and ‘The Value of Liveliness’, White Crypt, London. Notable collections that house her work include David Roberts Art Foundation and Simmons & Simmons law firm. McLean is a Teaching Fellow in Studio Art at Reading School of Art.
FRANCESCA MOLLETT
Francesca Mollett is influenced by the idea of the spirit of place, combining an awareness of intense communal experiences, lives lived before, in places where the organic and human meet, such as ancient barrows or public city gardens. Her work always encompasses a mindfulness of the particular qualities of weather, light, sound and movement in these contexts. Personal sensory experiences combine with the collective by exploring painterly languages that contain their own histories of expression and psychology.
Musing on the last month or so of working at home, Francesca observes:
In recent weeks, I move between my bedroom and the garden, wielding paintings down the stairs and through our narrow kitchen. As much as I can, I paint outside. I like the opportunity to lay them flat, to be close to them as I scrape areas away, and to allow the fluidity of paint to settle and dry into wet edges.
I have become interested in how they inhabit the space of the garden, what exterior shapes and colours rhyme between them, what might be coming in from outside. Unlike the studio, the garden isn’t an environment I can control, and when I come out here, it’s a focussed place to paint – just the painting and materials. The weather can affect the energy of the painting that day; wind, sun, shadows. Chance of rain pushing momentum into the work. Strong light creating lulls where I just want to sit in the sun and look at them, or have to squint to see them.
Inside, colours soften and darken, interior light diffuses them and they seem to hold together more solidly. In my studio, encounters can happen between printed, drawn and painted image, that then generate new ideas, suggested through an interplay of textures and shapes. In the space of my bedroom the paintings rest up close to each other and interact with the domestic surroundings; plants, books, lamp, fireplace, mirror. Seeing them in the mirror, flattened and reversed can help me see what I want to alter. They feel like elemental fragments waiting to be played with again.
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www.francescamollett.com
@__frangle
Francesca Mollett (b. 1991, Bristol) lives and works in London.
She is currently studying an MA Painting at the Royal College of Art, and will graduate in summer 2020. She previously graduated from the Royal Drawing School (2015) and BA Fine Art (Painting) at Wimbledon College of Arts (2014). Francesca had her first solo show, ‘Keyholes’ at Brockley Gardens, London in 2019. Recent exhibitions include ‘The Weird and the Eerie’ Hockney Gallery, RCA, London (2020), ‘Sympathetic Magic’, Zona Mista, London (2019) and ‘Dust sheet embroidered snow’, Project Gallery, Arundel (2019). Other previous exhibitions include, ‘The Value of Liveliness’, White Crypt (2018), ‘Smoke gets in your eye’, rural BAES (2018) ‘DRAW’, Mandells Gallery, Norwich (2018) and ‘A Face Like Yours’, A.P.T. Gallery (2017). From 2015 – 2016 Francesca co-ran a dedicated artist project space and small set of artist studios, The Benevolent Association of Excellent Solutions (BAES).