Francis Upritchard
Eeling in the Ōtakaro
Francis Upritchard Eeling in the Ōtakaro 2021/ 2025Bronze.with patina. Stone.3153 words.Art Bite March 7 2025Stephanie Beth
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
I have chosen this work for a number of reasons.
Some of Upritchards bronzes…. … lately, these are elongations. Elongation is her preoccupation currently. Not human figures. Sculptures as pairings. Each work is an experiment with tensions operating between shape, stretch and space. In twelve days I’ll be in Sydney and will go and see the three times 7 - 10ft tall bronze elongations in the complete work of Upritchard’s latest bronze assignment, Here comes everyone. This was cast in 2022. It is in the Sydney Naala Badu, Welcome Plaza1 This plaza is near a large cluster ofMorton Bay Fig trees. Their trunks are not dissimilar in form. The sinews of the trunks bulge, extrude and bind together as they thrust to the climate and the elements. The trunks hold the foliage steady. The roots of the trees say more about the story as symbiosis. Here comes everybody.’ is an exhibition that the artist was commissioned to do. Its theme is beings working together. Here Comes Everyone is funded by the NSW government and private donors.2 The exhibition there is a filfulment of this artist extending her interest in the motif of long armed and long legged beings in partnership with each other. Three pairs make up the whole sculpture there. There is piggy back imagery or shoulder ride imagery - i.e a smallerpiece with a long arm creature clung on top of a sinewy long legged form.
One immediately sees a Sisyphus myth perpetuating over there in Australia. Sisyphus is not alone in this iteration. There is a stack of three rocks being made by a pair in Sydney, climbing higher and higher.Upritchard has always liked the Greek myth she says, and people write about it that she says this. At this completed exhibition in New South Wales, families come, tall parents carry the odd child on their shoulders … those pairs look up and down the lines of energy and connection. They look at details of space between positive and negative shapes.
At this point you are with me listening as I reference the video of seeing the Sydney work. Three sculptures in Sydney are all pairs connected and engaged 100% with each other. There is the Sisyphus one. Then, another pair has the one clinging body with a long arm reaching down to touch a creature. That work is titled Pet. The pet might twist, bare its teeth. A clambering little creature is on the arm of the one with extended long arms. It could be a biting creepy crawly. The third pair is holding the pole of the plaza architecture with one of the elongations. The form holding the clinging shape safely reaches to the ground surface. That third work is titled Reach. The hand modelling on this third work is dominant.Upritchard did these three pairs in Italy at the Northern Italy Foundry with which she has years of relationship.
Art making is a process. Upritchard gives evidence that she has fed herself constantly with ideas. Ideas are not feelings though. It is rudimentarily important to recognize that the thrill for a sculptor is to work viewing and scheming the dynamic of power and energy forces, the interrelationships of line and space and the potential to make symbolic statements of positions of this energy as a force of beauty and cultural association. Such are the rudiments of the behaviour of sculptors applying the principle of aesthetics.
Because Upritchard is a mature known artist, she has scope to work big on commission. She has the set of skills, capacity of command to work large ideas to fulfilment at scale. To be of the calibre of commissioned sculptors to large public works is an accolade.
As to this work and the echo of the prototype for this work, I know that you know, some of you here, that an Artbite prior has been made about this work - the pair eeling. One in 2022. It is also great to know that one was made about an Upritchard in 2003. It is this length of decades of time that have inspired me to want to focus, to say something more, to celebrate gratitude for a locally raised artist who expresses achievement over a range of scale. We all know that large costs more. How delightful that we now all realise that we have become more aware of Upritchard. She works sculpturally in a scale of 1: 20 sometimes; to a scale of 1: 5 ( that is the scale of the maquette she built in balata for the eels for 2022) ; right up to a scale of assembly in 1: 1 ratio in 2023 - 5. To sense something more of the individual who commands the execution of this sculptural idea here, this pairing of figures wth eels, is, without doubt, a joy to the curatorial person for Dummies & Dopplegangers, Felicity Milburn. Milburn is responsible for the presence of this work. She had also invited Upritchard to exhibit a body of ideas with Paper Rock Stone.
This work is also a milestone that represents the binding punctuation point that has emerged and now has resulted since 2022 when the Gallery Director, Blair Jackson saw the great logic in being able to approve the house, the Sutton House, as Upritchard’s artist residency in 2021 - the studio and grounds newly refurbished to house her to a friendly , familiar and collegial work environment. It is important to say this. A team at an Art gallery makes significant decisions on how and where money is spent. That gallery team, on this count, hit bulls eye in 2022 with a large receptive and grateful public.
I have chosen this work for such a number of reasons.The first has been to centrally place our eyes upon the form that a sculptor has created. This is a form balanced by forces of weight, line gravity and core.
Here are three extenders. More questions produce more subjective rumination.Next question. the presence of a bronze and why?
Next question. I saw that this was leaving the room quite soon. I immediately had a question. Where will the sculpture be placed next.?
All of these questions lead to more:What is it about this artist’s drive? What is a dominant longform angle that Upritchard carries in her head?I am taking the liberty and the luck to consider her. As I remind us, her work has been here before. I could mention a small assembly of writers who have enjoyed her and point to her breadth of successes over the years. She is a figure in the culture for her force of effort. This talk from me, then, is a version of gratitude .
To answer the first: Large bronze sculpture for the public is historically attuned to requiring teamwork at a foundry. When sculptures are small they are maintained in cabinets, on shelves, in small crannies … actually, in the case of an early student Upritchard one time, small objects were stored in used spectacle cases.
The practice of a sculptor in bronze, especially largescale, denotes an already matured artist able to swing between the specific and focused commission of the large work. Meanwhile, and also, the capacity, particularly for this artist, is that she touches many nerves through a grasp that she also has on texture or spectrums of colour. You , this audience today, may most usually have thought about her generation, coming from a world of mid twentieth century childhood. Culture and its scattered objects of humanity have for years piled consumption layers upon rudimentary speculative dreaming. Don’t forget we have come through thousands and thousands of years. The curator, Milburn, has pulled off both degrees of angle upon this artist, of a spectrum of these reflective needs. The commission of the small, the textured, the primordial gesture of reach as a sign - particularly the sign that a long limb reaching or waving designates toour minds, all of our minds towards our existence. Uprichard is an investment , professionally so.
On this second thematic count, the artist had an exhibition in Copenhagen that just finished two weeks ago. This venue was a 1672 palace, now a contemporary art museum, with a program of exhibitions, performances & concerts. It was titled Any noise annoys an oyster .3
Specifically, Upritchard has the awareness and skills with which to use a multidisciplinary approach to ideas. It seems that she doesn't run dry. She is known for her interests in life’s very emergence, you could say, from the slime. It is not the industrial world of power and old steel that takes her fancy. It is the vulnerabilities of life and the importance of shared dependencies; it’s about co-operation and the tenuous as well as the tumultuous vortexes of existence. Not alway inclined to the velocity of this mood, she works vigorously alone a lot. Life is, for an artist, certainly not all teamwork. There is an interview where she describes putting on headphones, playing music, shutting out other sounds - this is about going for hours with her fingers on clay - clay or a polymar. This love of modelling, this degree of pleasure in evolving shapes in wet soft material, is at the core of her position of being a sculptor.
I will give you a small cluster of asides. I was at Art school when Tom Taylor taught sculpture. How wonderful that he saw the design and building of Bill Sutton’s house as a set of well thought out spaces. I was at Art school when young Bing Dawe worked opposite me drawing up first assignment ideas. I have spent my whole Christchurch life being conscious of his treatments of eels - the whip and twist of muscles, the carnivorous capacity; all of this reminds us of living creatures and food source, of society as collaboration, particularly, in the instance of eels ,as foodstock, and maintaining their well-being. The Otakaro has been dredged of tons of sludge from the Christchurch earthquake so that a few huge eels may be seen and tickled at finger length on this river. Out at Lake Ellsmere, the tuna are trapped in toxic water from runoff from dairy farming on the Banks peninsula farms. Did you know that Maori always traditionally cut challens through the gap Birlings flat for the tuna to swim out through to breeding in the sea?
I gave myself just over a week to think of a few things I ‘d like to say here. For example, listen to this from 2014 about the malleable material, balata.
Francis says discovery of the rubber, balata, was a happenstance. While in Belem,’ Brazil for a residency in 2004 ’, she stumbled upon balata figurines at an outdoor market. The material, the figurines, and the seller intrigued her. Mr. Darlindo, the artisan and seller with whom Upritchard struck up a conversation, invited her back to his studio for a lesson. After a brief stint working alongside Darlindo at his home, —ever on the look-out for new materials with which to experiment— she saw potential in the unique substance. Darlindo collected balata for Upritchard and shipped it back in 1 kilogram blocks, back to her studio in London. In all, he sent a total of 10 kilograms to the artist.4 By this time she had access to a forge in Italy and a team to work with her there. That working contract allows for sets of grand manifested ideas to be reached. Thousands more world wide audience, due to the Italian forge. So, we are looking at an international artist’s work. Upritchard lives between London, Italy and New Zealand.
To visit Christchurch for a while, and make art to theme, was not a hard decision for her. She moved to live here with her family in 1975. She has been a Londoner since the late nineties.
Listen to this. It’s an interview where the artist heard the words Wetwang Slack in England. Upritchard said:
‘Wetwang Slack first caught my ear rather than my eye; it almost sounds rude. I went to Hull during 2017 because I took part in my friend Brian Griffiths’s puppet show .{ He Pulled the Right Levers and You Did the Asking]. We had a spare day, so we went to the amazing local Hull & East Riding Museum, which houses a lot of British Iron Age sculpture and a hilarious old diorama depicting life at Wetwang Slack.
Wetwang was a hugely significant site for historians in determining what life was like during the Iron Age and a lot of its collection is now at the British Museum; it was pre-Christian Celtic. Wetwang is particularly important as a chariot burial site, as the wheels of chariots are placed on top of human remains and I’ve used the motif of horse shoes and chariot wheels in these new works.’ 5
(The site is in a dry valley on the north side of the village of Wetwang. The archaeological remains consist of three chariot burial inhumations, each containing skeletal remains above the remains of a dismantled cart or chariot. )6
Listen to this:
This was an exhibition in Belgium in early 2020 Big fish eat little fish .The project at the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens is a reinterpretation of the Wetwang Slack exhibition at the Barbican Centre (London, 2018). For Big Fish Eat Little Fish, (2020) Upritchard will create a number of new works in a scenography that embraces the architecture of MDD, the museum gallery. The title refers to a drawing by Bruegel who, just like Upritchard’s earlier work, alludes to a meaningless world in which the powerful instinctively prey on the weak. 7 To look up this gallery exhibition, we can see a version of the sculpted eel theme in one sculpture there with this two creature partnership.There, with almost no reference than other to the reality of predation, the exhibition seems to simply be facts of life. It , in Belgium, offers a segue to ideas going forward to Christchurch,Otautahi and beyond. It is important to note this. Sculpture making is months and years of hard work. Maintaining the work process is fed by the strength of the tension of ideas about energy and team and curatorial relationships.
This idea about the value of thinking about life, carrying forward to bronze is integral to the process that Upritchard uses, whether with balata, or earlier for polymers, or earlier even further , for the rags of mummies and the rites of all of our passages.
She works in a 1: 5 ratio on the marquettes. The balata suits. It must be worked swiftly. It is heated up so that it can be rolled then placed and stacked onto a steel armature by a team. The assembly must be swiftly done. Several hands must slap this on when it is for a full scale size. She pulls and prods with her fingers. Tthe quickness of her decision making process is enough when she shapes enough. This is her generosity as an artist. She knows that she can do enough to trigger communication. She embraces her public. This is a tradition they share and belong to - to sculpt and give this way. *
Then, the process continues.
For fullscale works, the foam is sprayed on to a steel armature frame, incised and scraped . What follows is adding on the balata as a skin. She first covers the armature with modelled foam.Then to the foundry. The balata is heated to melt, the heat allows a skin to bubble away to become replaced by a hot pouring of liquid bronze -
The bronze form cools in a bed of sand. The bronze then becomes a shell. This negative shape - for assembly and finish. This bronze is with a patina. The patina is potassium sulphate and zinc oxide.
We may or may not know that Upritchard quite seriously as a child studied the violin, then one day she put it down and then said that she was going to focus on art. Like any profession a person must research hard. A person hits their traps by their late thirties. Already, in the briefest of research that I have done, it is her remarks about cutting off her hair and seeding hair into floorboards on High Street, Christchurch , ( that must have been around 1996 ) show that Upritchard thinks with body awareness. She gives her body to art.
The artist was thrilled to research some Japanese ‘ friendly giants’ in a folktale. Figures with long legs, long arms. No longer the European reference for her here. This is the coast, fresh water, river food and sea. ( Coloured illustrations of the figure drawings are in the video presented for Here Comes Everyone. ) These mythical creatures work together. One has long legs. One has long arms. They go fishing as a pair. Figurines of these are sold at the beaches. They symbolise symbiosis.
The extent of Upritchard’s imagination is her confidence with the doubts she puts to practice as ideas. All relationships imply how life has a sameness;asource ; a need ; fills with a command for sufficient duration. Upritchard makes works that demarcate scales of relationship as an acceptance and a wonder.
Eeling in the Otakaro - this actual image is unlikely to register fully about the relationship of humans to rivers. Eeelers typically, actually, now mostly farm eels in baths for the commercial market. Eeling is a fast growing commercial industry. ‘ Eels are carnivorous. They are a long - living species. They spend most of their life in freshwater, but return to the sea to breed.’ 8 To love a person’s dwelling upon the messages of myth, however, opens the door to appreciation. It is very refreshing.
I read about Rodin.Some of his works....Monument to Balzac. ..The Burghers of Calais. ...The Walking Man. ...
The Rodin website put together this text: ‘His genius was to express inner truths of the human psyche, and his gaze penetrated beneath the external appearance of the world. Exploring this realm beneath the surface, Rodin developed an agile technique for rendering the extreme physical states that correspond to expressions of inner turmoil or overwhelming joy. He sculpted a universe of great passion and tragedy, a world of imagination that exceeded the mundane reality of everyday existence.The hallmarks of Rodin's style—his decision not to smooth over or hide signs of his sculptural process and the creation of sculptures from parts of the body like hands—were revolutionary in his time.’9
I have driven past the giant spider sculpture Maman, created by Louise Bourgeois (1999) located outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. The sculpture is a tribute to the artist's mother, who was a weaver. 10
We are free to enjoy the motivations of Francis Upritchard. We thank and farewell this latest arrival to be given a home in this place.
Nga mihi
References UpritchardNSW. Plaza https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/visit/plan-your-visit/campus/north-building/https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/349.2022.a-c/ https://www.contemporaryartlibrary.org/project/francis-upritchard-at-museum-dhondt-dhaenens-deurle-12209/52https://hammer.ucla.edu/blog/2014/12/an-unruly-material-balata-in-francis-upritchards-practicehttp://www.gobronze.org/from.htmlhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/263242332_Chariots_and_context_New_radiocarbon_dates_from_wetwang_and_the_chronology_of_iron_age_burials_and_brooches_in_East_Yorkshirehttps://www.katemacgarry.com/news/133-francis-upritchard-any-noise-annoys-an-oyster-kunsthal-28-september-2024-16-february-2025/https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/freshwater-fish/eels/https://rodinmuseum.org/collection/about-auguste-rodinhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maman_(sculpture)
Notes.The exhibition 2022 stated: ‘Upritchard to learn of two yōkai (or ‘strange apparitions’) from Japanese folklore known together as Ashinaga-Tenaga (Long Legs and Long Arms), ‘helper’ figures who symbolise harmonious working relationships. In her retelling, long-armed Tenaga-jin (手長人) sits on long-legged Ashinaga-jin’s (足長人) shoulders while they fish in deep water. Together, they do what they could never manage apart. They are tangled and bound by a pair of swimming tuna (eels) – It does not hurt to recall what being a sculptor is all about. My generation, in this country, saw Rodin in the late 1960’s for the first time as the British council toured works to the commonwealth.
Notes
*Note. Being steely, not a bitch. Stuff 2016https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/80189428/francis-upritchard-and-the-art-of-unease
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
I have chosen this work for a number of reasons.
Some of Upritchards bronzes…. … lately, these are elongations. Elongation is her preoccupation currently. Not human figures. Sculptures as pairings. Each work is an experiment with tensions operating between shape, stretch and space. In twelve days I’ll be in Sydney and will go and see the three times 7 - 10ft tall bronze elongations in the complete work of Upritchard’s latest bronze assignment, Here comes everyone. This was cast in 2022. It is in the Sydney Naala Badu, Welcome Plaza1 This plaza is near a large cluster ofMorton Bay Fig trees. Their trunks are not dissimilar in form. The sinews of the trunks bulge, extrude and bind together as they thrust to the climate and the elements. The trunks hold the foliage steady. The roots of the trees say more about the story as symbiosis. Here comes everybody.’ is an exhibition that the artist was commissioned to do. Its theme is beings working together. Here Comes Everyone is funded by the NSW government and private donors.2 The exhibition there is a filfulment of this artist extending her interest in the motif of long armed and long legged beings in partnership with each other. Three pairs make up the whole sculpture there. There is piggy back imagery or shoulder ride imagery - i.e a smallerpiece with a long arm creature clung on top of a sinewy long legged form.
One immediately sees a Sisyphus myth perpetuating over there in Australia. Sisyphus is not alone in this iteration. There is a stack of three rocks being made by a pair in Sydney, climbing higher and higher.Upritchard has always liked the Greek myth she says, and people write about it that she says this. At this completed exhibition in New South Wales, families come, tall parents carry the odd child on their shoulders … those pairs look up and down the lines of energy and connection. They look at details of space between positive and negative shapes.
At this point you are with me listening as I reference the video of seeing the Sydney work. Three sculptures in Sydney are all pairs connected and engaged 100% with each other. There is the Sisyphus one. Then, another pair has the one clinging body with a long arm reaching down to touch a creature. That work is titled Pet. The pet might twist, bare its teeth. A clambering little creature is on the arm of the one with extended long arms. It could be a biting creepy crawly. The third pair is holding the pole of the plaza architecture with one of the elongations. The form holding the clinging shape safely reaches to the ground surface. That third work is titled Reach. The hand modelling on this third work is dominant.Upritchard did these three pairs in Italy at the Northern Italy Foundry with which she has years of relationship.
Art making is a process. Upritchard gives evidence that she has fed herself constantly with ideas. Ideas are not feelings though. It is rudimentarily important to recognize that the thrill for a sculptor is to work viewing and scheming the dynamic of power and energy forces, the interrelationships of line and space and the potential to make symbolic statements of positions of this energy as a force of beauty and cultural association. Such are the rudiments of the behaviour of sculptors applying the principle of aesthetics.
Because Upritchard is a mature known artist, she has scope to work big on commission. She has the set of skills, capacity of command to work large ideas to fulfilment at scale. To be of the calibre of commissioned sculptors to large public works is an accolade.
As to this work and the echo of the prototype for this work, I know that you know, some of you here, that an Artbite prior has been made about this work - the pair eeling. One in 2022. It is also great to know that one was made about an Upritchard in 2003. It is this length of decades of time that have inspired me to want to focus, to say something more, to celebrate gratitude for a locally raised artist who expresses achievement over a range of scale. We all know that large costs more. How delightful that we now all realise that we have become more aware of Upritchard. She works sculpturally in a scale of 1: 20 sometimes; to a scale of 1: 5 ( that is the scale of the maquette she built in balata for the eels for 2022) ; right up to a scale of assembly in 1: 1 ratio in 2023 - 5. To sense something more of the individual who commands the execution of this sculptural idea here, this pairing of figures wth eels, is, without doubt, a joy to the curatorial person for Dummies & Dopplegangers, Felicity Milburn. Milburn is responsible for the presence of this work. She had also invited Upritchard to exhibit a body of ideas with Paper Rock Stone.
This work is also a milestone that represents the binding punctuation point that has emerged and now has resulted since 2022 when the Gallery Director, Blair Jackson saw the great logic in being able to approve the house, the Sutton House, as Upritchard’s artist residency in 2021 - the studio and grounds newly refurbished to house her to a friendly , familiar and collegial work environment. It is important to say this. A team at an Art gallery makes significant decisions on how and where money is spent. That gallery team, on this count, hit bulls eye in 2022 with a large receptive and grateful public.
I have chosen this work for such a number of reasons.The first has been to centrally place our eyes upon the form that a sculptor has created. This is a form balanced by forces of weight, line gravity and core.
Here are three extenders. More questions produce more subjective rumination.Next question. the presence of a bronze and why?
Next question. I saw that this was leaving the room quite soon. I immediately had a question. Where will the sculpture be placed next.?
All of these questions lead to more:What is it about this artist’s drive? What is a dominant longform angle that Upritchard carries in her head?I am taking the liberty and the luck to consider her. As I remind us, her work has been here before. I could mention a small assembly of writers who have enjoyed her and point to her breadth of successes over the years. She is a figure in the culture for her force of effort. This talk from me, then, is a version of gratitude .
To answer the first: Large bronze sculpture for the public is historically attuned to requiring teamwork at a foundry. When sculptures are small they are maintained in cabinets, on shelves, in small crannies … actually, in the case of an early student Upritchard one time, small objects were stored in used spectacle cases.
The practice of a sculptor in bronze, especially largescale, denotes an already matured artist able to swing between the specific and focused commission of the large work. Meanwhile, and also, the capacity, particularly for this artist, is that she touches many nerves through a grasp that she also has on texture or spectrums of colour. You , this audience today, may most usually have thought about her generation, coming from a world of mid twentieth century childhood. Culture and its scattered objects of humanity have for years piled consumption layers upon rudimentary speculative dreaming. Don’t forget we have come through thousands and thousands of years. The curator, Milburn, has pulled off both degrees of angle upon this artist, of a spectrum of these reflective needs. The commission of the small, the textured, the primordial gesture of reach as a sign - particularly the sign that a long limb reaching or waving designates toour minds, all of our minds towards our existence. Uprichard is an investment , professionally so.
On this second thematic count, the artist had an exhibition in Copenhagen that just finished two weeks ago. This venue was a 1672 palace, now a contemporary art museum, with a program of exhibitions, performances & concerts. It was titled Any noise annoys an oyster .3
Specifically, Upritchard has the awareness and skills with which to use a multidisciplinary approach to ideas. It seems that she doesn't run dry. She is known for her interests in life’s very emergence, you could say, from the slime. It is not the industrial world of power and old steel that takes her fancy. It is the vulnerabilities of life and the importance of shared dependencies; it’s about co-operation and the tenuous as well as the tumultuous vortexes of existence. Not alway inclined to the velocity of this mood, she works vigorously alone a lot. Life is, for an artist, certainly not all teamwork. There is an interview where she describes putting on headphones, playing music, shutting out other sounds - this is about going for hours with her fingers on clay - clay or a polymar. This love of modelling, this degree of pleasure in evolving shapes in wet soft material, is at the core of her position of being a sculptor.
I will give you a small cluster of asides. I was at Art school when Tom Taylor taught sculpture. How wonderful that he saw the design and building of Bill Sutton’s house as a set of well thought out spaces. I was at Art school when young Bing Dawe worked opposite me drawing up first assignment ideas. I have spent my whole Christchurch life being conscious of his treatments of eels - the whip and twist of muscles, the carnivorous capacity; all of this reminds us of living creatures and food source, of society as collaboration, particularly, in the instance of eels ,as foodstock, and maintaining their well-being. The Otakaro has been dredged of tons of sludge from the Christchurch earthquake so that a few huge eels may be seen and tickled at finger length on this river. Out at Lake Ellsmere, the tuna are trapped in toxic water from runoff from dairy farming on the Banks peninsula farms. Did you know that Maori always traditionally cut challens through the gap Birlings flat for the tuna to swim out through to breeding in the sea?
I gave myself just over a week to think of a few things I ‘d like to say here. For example, listen to this from 2014 about the malleable material, balata.
Francis says discovery of the rubber, balata, was a happenstance. While in Belem,’ Brazil for a residency in 2004 ’, she stumbled upon balata figurines at an outdoor market. The material, the figurines, and the seller intrigued her. Mr. Darlindo, the artisan and seller with whom Upritchard struck up a conversation, invited her back to his studio for a lesson. After a brief stint working alongside Darlindo at his home, —ever on the look-out for new materials with which to experiment— she saw potential in the unique substance. Darlindo collected balata for Upritchard and shipped it back in 1 kilogram blocks, back to her studio in London. In all, he sent a total of 10 kilograms to the artist.4 By this time she had access to a forge in Italy and a team to work with her there. That working contract allows for sets of grand manifested ideas to be reached. Thousands more world wide audience, due to the Italian forge. So, we are looking at an international artist’s work. Upritchard lives between London, Italy and New Zealand.
To visit Christchurch for a while, and make art to theme, was not a hard decision for her. She moved to live here with her family in 1975. She has been a Londoner since the late nineties.
Listen to this. It’s an interview where the artist heard the words Wetwang Slack in England. Upritchard said:
‘Wetwang Slack first caught my ear rather than my eye; it almost sounds rude. I went to Hull during 2017 because I took part in my friend Brian Griffiths’s puppet show .{ He Pulled the Right Levers and You Did the Asking]. We had a spare day, so we went to the amazing local Hull & East Riding Museum, which houses a lot of British Iron Age sculpture and a hilarious old diorama depicting life at Wetwang Slack.
Wetwang was a hugely significant site for historians in determining what life was like during the Iron Age and a lot of its collection is now at the British Museum; it was pre-Christian Celtic. Wetwang is particularly important as a chariot burial site, as the wheels of chariots are placed on top of human remains and I’ve used the motif of horse shoes and chariot wheels in these new works.’ 5
(The site is in a dry valley on the north side of the village of Wetwang. The archaeological remains consist of three chariot burial inhumations, each containing skeletal remains above the remains of a dismantled cart or chariot. )6
Listen to this:
This was an exhibition in Belgium in early 2020 Big fish eat little fish .The project at the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens is a reinterpretation of the Wetwang Slack exhibition at the Barbican Centre (London, 2018). For Big Fish Eat Little Fish, (2020) Upritchard will create a number of new works in a scenography that embraces the architecture of MDD, the museum gallery. The title refers to a drawing by Bruegel who, just like Upritchard’s earlier work, alludes to a meaningless world in which the powerful instinctively prey on the weak. 7 To look up this gallery exhibition, we can see a version of the sculpted eel theme in one sculpture there with this two creature partnership.There, with almost no reference than other to the reality of predation, the exhibition seems to simply be facts of life. It , in Belgium, offers a segue to ideas going forward to Christchurch,Otautahi and beyond. It is important to note this. Sculpture making is months and years of hard work. Maintaining the work process is fed by the strength of the tension of ideas about energy and team and curatorial relationships.
This idea about the value of thinking about life, carrying forward to bronze is integral to the process that Upritchard uses, whether with balata, or earlier for polymers, or earlier even further , for the rags of mummies and the rites of all of our passages.
She works in a 1: 5 ratio on the marquettes. The balata suits. It must be worked swiftly. It is heated up so that it can be rolled then placed and stacked onto a steel armature by a team. The assembly must be swiftly done. Several hands must slap this on when it is for a full scale size. She pulls and prods with her fingers. Tthe quickness of her decision making process is enough when she shapes enough. This is her generosity as an artist. She knows that she can do enough to trigger communication. She embraces her public. This is a tradition they share and belong to - to sculpt and give this way. *
Then, the process continues.
For fullscale works, the foam is sprayed on to a steel armature frame, incised and scraped . What follows is adding on the balata as a skin. She first covers the armature with modelled foam.Then to the foundry. The balata is heated to melt, the heat allows a skin to bubble away to become replaced by a hot pouring of liquid bronze -
The bronze form cools in a bed of sand. The bronze then becomes a shell. This negative shape - for assembly and finish. This bronze is with a patina. The patina is potassium sulphate and zinc oxide.
We may or may not know that Upritchard quite seriously as a child studied the violin, then one day she put it down and then said that she was going to focus on art. Like any profession a person must research hard. A person hits their traps by their late thirties. Already, in the briefest of research that I have done, it is her remarks about cutting off her hair and seeding hair into floorboards on High Street, Christchurch , ( that must have been around 1996 ) show that Upritchard thinks with body awareness. She gives her body to art.
The artist was thrilled to research some Japanese ‘ friendly giants’ in a folktale. Figures with long legs, long arms. No longer the European reference for her here. This is the coast, fresh water, river food and sea. ( Coloured illustrations of the figure drawings are in the video presented for Here Comes Everyone. ) These mythical creatures work together. One has long legs. One has long arms. They go fishing as a pair. Figurines of these are sold at the beaches. They symbolise symbiosis.
The extent of Upritchard’s imagination is her confidence with the doubts she puts to practice as ideas. All relationships imply how life has a sameness;asource ; a need ; fills with a command for sufficient duration. Upritchard makes works that demarcate scales of relationship as an acceptance and a wonder.
Eeling in the Otakaro - this actual image is unlikely to register fully about the relationship of humans to rivers. Eeelers typically, actually, now mostly farm eels in baths for the commercial market. Eeling is a fast growing commercial industry. ‘ Eels are carnivorous. They are a long - living species. They spend most of their life in freshwater, but return to the sea to breed.’ 8 To love a person’s dwelling upon the messages of myth, however, opens the door to appreciation. It is very refreshing.
I read about Rodin.Some of his works....Monument to Balzac. ..The Burghers of Calais. ...The Walking Man. ...
The Rodin website put together this text: ‘His genius was to express inner truths of the human psyche, and his gaze penetrated beneath the external appearance of the world. Exploring this realm beneath the surface, Rodin developed an agile technique for rendering the extreme physical states that correspond to expressions of inner turmoil or overwhelming joy. He sculpted a universe of great passion and tragedy, a world of imagination that exceeded the mundane reality of everyday existence.The hallmarks of Rodin's style—his decision not to smooth over or hide signs of his sculptural process and the creation of sculptures from parts of the body like hands—were revolutionary in his time.’9
I have driven past the giant spider sculpture Maman, created by Louise Bourgeois (1999) located outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. The sculpture is a tribute to the artist's mother, who was a weaver. 10
We are free to enjoy the motivations of Francis Upritchard. We thank and farewell this latest arrival to be given a home in this place.
Nga mihi
References UpritchardNSW. Plaza https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/visit/plan-your-visit/campus/north-building/https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/349.2022.a-c/ https://www.contemporaryartlibrary.org/project/francis-upritchard-at-museum-dhondt-dhaenens-deurle-12209/52https://hammer.ucla.edu/blog/2014/12/an-unruly-material-balata-in-francis-upritchards-practicehttp://www.gobronze.org/from.htmlhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/263242332_Chariots_and_context_New_radiocarbon_dates_from_wetwang_and_the_chronology_of_iron_age_burials_and_brooches_in_East_Yorkshirehttps://www.katemacgarry.com/news/133-francis-upritchard-any-noise-annoys-an-oyster-kunsthal-28-september-2024-16-february-2025/https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/freshwater-fish/eels/https://rodinmuseum.org/collection/about-auguste-rodinhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maman_(sculpture)
Notes.The exhibition 2022 stated: ‘Upritchard to learn of two yōkai (or ‘strange apparitions’) from Japanese folklore known together as Ashinaga-Tenaga (Long Legs and Long Arms), ‘helper’ figures who symbolise harmonious working relationships. In her retelling, long-armed Tenaga-jin (手長人) sits on long-legged Ashinaga-jin’s (足長人) shoulders while they fish in deep water. Together, they do what they could never manage apart. They are tangled and bound by a pair of swimming tuna (eels) – It does not hurt to recall what being a sculptor is all about. My generation, in this country, saw Rodin in the late 1960’s for the first time as the British council toured works to the commonwealth.
Notes
*Note. Being steely, not a bitch. Stuff 2016https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/80189428/francis-upritchard-and-the-art-of-unease