In a rather disarming preamble to this exhibition, Barbara Franc writes of her sculptures being linked together in what she hopes is 'a celebration of life and the very simple and slightly selfish pleasure of bringing a smile to people's faces'. For observers of her work there is certainly a childish sense of wonder and pleasure at these extraordinary creations.
Viewed close up, Franc's works reward intimate scrutiny with myriad tiny rewards. Time Flies, for example (see detail below), is a dressage horse in balletic motion, composed largely of dozens of watch and clock components which have been artfully chosen, placed, and refashioned in ways which simultaneously draw attention to themselves and their mechanical original and add to the organic horsiness of the overall body.
[img_assist|nid=1696|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=86|height=200]Here too are gambolling foxes, insolent mackaws and cockatoos, characterful crows and magpies, jackets at once rigid and seemingly rippling in a non-existent breeze. At the heart of these pieces are surprising disparities between the rigidity of her materials and the mutability of the life they convey.
The fact that Franc plays with such paradoxes using grace and humour does not detract from the thought-provoking themes at their root. An ornamental spoon shank can at the same time be a pleasing form, an eye, a vein, a souvenir and the artist's focus upon line and form. A kimono is at once an item of clothing, a sculpture, an assemblage of torn biscuit tins painstakingly threaded, and a statement about expectations and realities, methods and messages.
Franc began studying life drawing and painting in the 1970s under Maggie Hambling and John Bellaney at Morley College of Art. A member of the Nine Elms Group, she has since gone on to exhibit extensively (mainly in the South East of England), producing works for both domestic display and garden and outdoor settings.
[img_assist|nid=1697|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=197|height=200]She works with whatever will bend or melt, creating pieces which are suggestively fluid and organic out of parts which have themslves been made and bring to their new 'existence' a fashioned history as something else.
'I'll often get the germ of an idea for a new piece by just picking up a piece of discarded metal – for example a jam jar lid might turn into a flower head or part of a cat! I might have scraps of lead sheet which I'll start to "stitch" together and they transform into the idea of making a corset out of this soft, malleable metal.'
The results are significantly more than the sum of their parts: charming and profound, enamelled artifices set upon golden boughs to sing 'Of what is past, or passing, or to come'. AM
Diversity runs at the Union Gallery, 34 Broughton Street until 2 May.
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