“How can I destabilise the boundary between body, water and landscape, begin to 'think with water' as I think with painting?”
—Francesca Mollett

Organic, instinctive and physical, in The Place I Chose to Stand​ British artist Francesca Mollett reflects on the natural world through lived and metaphysical experience. Mollett’s pictorial spaces are low lit yet luminescent, liquid and without threshold, states that embrace the chance beauty and capricious qualities of the elements. Like the gossamer wings of a butterfly or the undulating surface of water, layers of purple, pink and red flicker from the sapphire blue ground here, generating forms that are deeply elemental but also ethereal and insubstantial. As the artist has described: ‘An energy is a force of expression. The water produces an effect on the surroundings, both body and land express a frequency’ and it is this sense of transference between objects, their surroundings, and the interior transformations that energise Mollett’s compositions and have garnered her significant critical attention in recent years.ⁱ

 

Offered for the first time at auction and included in the artist’s 2021 presentation Wild Place with Informality Gallery in London, The Place I Chose to Stand​ responds to Mollett’s sensitive understanding of the landscape. Painted in 2021, the present work was conceived during Mollett’s visit to the sacred wells in the South-West England town of Penwith. Once mined for copper and tin, in local folklore the dual presence of water and metal deposits resulted in the ancient springs to be revered for their alchemic, holy qualities. These uncanny sensations were experienced by Mollett during her visit who felt she was being observed by the ancient landscape, as if alive. Amidst these vast, vacuous subterranean passages, Mollett connects the material body to the expanse of the exterior world, embracing the imaginative states yielded by the natural environment. Like her contemporary Jadé Fadojutimi’s luminous canvases saturated with light and colour, Mollett translates her immersive and transformative vision of the environment through a mastery of her materials and sophistication of her formal language, creating scenes that feel at once familiar and intangible, conjuring worlds beyond.

 

A Chat With: Francessca Mollett, L.U.P.O Lorenzelli Projects

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Born in Bristol in 1991, Francesca Mollett is among a burgeoning wave of British abstract female artists like Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Jadé Fadojutimi that champion non-traditional approaches to paint and form.

• Since graduating with a Masters in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2020, Mollett has earned growing acclaim. Mollett’s work can be found in distinguished public and private collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong and the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, amongst others.

• Having worked with Hauser & Wirth and Micki Meng, Mollett’s solo exhibition in New York with her gallery representative GRIMM recently closed on 22^nd June 2024.

 

ⁱ Francesca Mollett, 'Press Release: Francesca Mollett - Wild Shade', Informality Gallery, 2021