Frances Hansen - Looking at practice: Noticing and responding

Blog question: choose at least 2 things from Frances Hansen's process list and explore in relation to her practice.



This week's lecture was on the Drawing lecturer-Frances Hansen. I was very interested in what Frances will show us since the beginning of the semester, as i did well in her class and i am better in dealing with painting and 2D related artworks than other aspects of art. Therefore it was exciting to finally see some artworks by Frances as she talks about how she come to construct ideas for her works.

Frances provided us her 4 steps in her process of art making, under each step there is a list of methods. From this lecture i found Frances's methods of 'gathering', 'composing' and 'experimenting' most inspirational.

It is amazing to see the long list of years of practices that dates all the way back 10 years. I feel so inexperienced compared to France's years of making art, considering i have only started 2 years ago. It also amazes me how fast she can generate ideas that constructs successful artworks that are refined enough to display in galleries, as she is capable of producing large amount of works within the period of a year.

Frances have a passion for collecting objects, she collects anything that holds her interest, whether it's the attraction to the physical form, or the visual imagery and sometimes just for the material. She states that she always carry a camera in her bag to document down the things that draws her attention, which i thought is a very effective way of collecting as a camera is the best tool to capture visual details. It is a habit i will try to make of. An artist Frances mentioned that relates to this practice is Patrick Pound, he did many artworks just about noticing and responding to the unsurprising objects.



This piece is called 'Landscape of Mirrors' by Patrick Pound. I really like the positive and negative effect of this piece. This concept also relates to the basket artworks from Frances, which i are my personal favourites. She paints silhouettes of household cleaning projects inside small baskets with pretty fabricated bases, that were mostly made during the 50s-80s. These are out of fashioned products that were overlooked most of the time, however Frances used these objects and transformed it to a piece of decorative artwork that can be appreciated.






Frances base her artworks on the events taking place in her everyday living. The basket with painted cleaning products reflects a feminine/domesticity aspect of her life.

I also really liked the idea of collection of plant tags that Frances mentioned. Which carries an enviormental message in her artworks. It shows that just about anything can have an artistic element that does not get acknowledged and would be often considered as rubbish. Artist like Frances collects them and reuse this waste and all the sudden people cherish what they previously thrown away as art that they hang on their walls.

After the collection of objects, Frances showed us a series of work in progress pictures taken of her work area. She describe her way of planning out the layout of each piece as 'lots of moving around and mask tapes'. She arranges her composition by constantly moving, layering and taping down the visuals temporarily. If she is not happy with the layout then this process repeats. Many of France's painting have a collage quality to it.
This reminded me alot of Marry Curtis's method of compositioning her pieces of jewelleries. Who also spends long periods of time rearranging the format of the pieces of her work and documenting her progress by taking photos of her work space.

During the endless changing process, experimenting also seem to play a key role in making a piece of successful artwork. One point i find really interesting was the way Frances adepts to site. She alters and try new ways to present her work in relation to where she will be displaying her works. This use of method seem similar to how artist Robert Rauschenburg's practices, whom is another artist Frances was influenced by. Also I personally think he is a great experimentalist with different type of medias.



'He found his signature mode by embracing materials traditionally outside of the artist’s reach. He would cover a canvas with house paint, or ink the wheel of a car and run it over paper to create a drawing, while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal painting.' - American masters.




http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/robert-rauschenberg/about-the-artist/49/


I felt that Frances's own practice was very much like the way Rauschenburg find new ways to mark-making. The collage appearance of her artworks also relates to the pieced together element that of Rauschenburg's signature.

I really enjoyed the lecture from Frances. I also appreciate the fact she have given us a handout about her art-making process, which will be really useful for me to try some of the new ways to construct artworks. I found most interest in her ways of gathering inspirations, composing layouts and experiments that she uses. I am very keen to try her process in my own works and develop a good habit for art-making.

Additionally i really liked the add-on lecture from Tessa- A Garden of Peculiarities or Plant = Art. I even found some new interesting artists i never heard of before from the task Tessa set for the class, which was to find an artwork about plants.

Some of my favourite new found artist are Ryan Wolfe, who constructed a installation where the plants are lit up from the inside, Sarah Sze, Nancy Rubins and Philip Ross.





-Ryan Wolfe