FRANCESCA BLOMFIELD: INTERNATIONAL TREATY
PRIVATE VIEW: FRIDAY 30th OCT 7PM
EXHIBITION: SAT 31st OCT – SAT 21st NOV, WEDS – SAT, 12 – 6PM
Blomfield’s bold paintings use recycled, divergent images, and visual information sourced from masonic clipart, YouTube, Google searches, archives of international museum-quality objects, shopping catalogues and adverts for services and goods, to create new meanings. Iconographic symbols and patterns are abstracted into a non-hierarchical surface, a diffident, ambiguous, nihilistic pop of sorts.
A seemingly arbitrary selection of affects share symbolic connections; a desire to spiritually grow through material objects. Borrowing structures such as diagrams, compressed cultural artefacts and found instructional text; there is a focus on protocols, relationships and exchanges that arise from our contact with the paintings as well as our relationship with the information they carry. Speculative information and elusive subjects such as new age phenomena, UFOs and credit cards; around which common ideas and beliefs of ‘other worlds’ and secret knowledge emerge.
Formally, Blomfield’s work focuses on instances of symmetry and repetition that form visual patterns and internal rhythms within the formalities of painting; these connections with popular culture are played with and re-processed. Her accompanying publications have allowed her to further explore the tangents within the narratives in the paintings in order to question the limitations of painting and establish the connections between the paintings as sequences.
INTERNATIONAL TREATY is a solo presentation bringing together recent paintings as well as a publication produced specifically for the exhibition, which expands on Blomfield’s on-going interest in the limitations of paintings as objects.
Francesca Blomfield studied at Chelsea College of Art. Following her graduation in 2012 she has worked on a number of collaborative events with organisations including STRYX in Birmingham, and the Pipe Factory in Glasgow and was awarded the 2015 Jerwood Painting Fellowship.