Frances Pinnock

An assemblage of fine brass rod, leather forms and threads created curves and lines.

Frances Pinnock (b. 1990, Bristol UK) is an artist working across sculpture and drawing. From a background in puppetry she studied for a BA in Modelmaking at the Arts University Bournemouth (2014) before working in bespoke leatherwork and establishing her studio practice in 2018.

She works primarily in skin based materials and employs hand stitching as a method of fabrication. Sculptures play with symmetry and additional materials such as horsehair, wool, wax and collected brass objects.

Frances is a recipient of the Leverhulme Arts Scholarship and is a former recipient of grants from Arts Council England and the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust.

Recent exhibitions include Cut and Fold at Make Hauser and Wirth, Somerset (2023), artist-led Material Beings at Cromwell Place, London (2023) and FOG Design + Art, San Francisco (2022) with Sarah Myerscough Gallery.

She lives and works in London.

a black and white image of an a person sitting cross legged on the floor stitching work beside a sculpture

Through drawing, object making and movement, Frances Pinnock considers things in states of motion and stasis. Ideas around tension and release, formulaic and intuitive movement and focused attention and reverie underpin her work.

Spanning a range of scales, from handheld objects to large floor standing works, Frances draws on material and making references from a background in puppetry and accessories construction.

Objects are fabricated through a labour intensive process of pattern cutting and hand stitching and sheet materials such as leather, facilitate a thinking that oscillates between two and three dimensions.

The work in this exhibition incorporates welded armatures enabling unlikely forms to balance in space - moving towards levitation.

Between Wake and Sleep

2023

Leather, wool, steel, brass, hemp, beeswax

220h x 300w x 80d cm

From an ongoing sculpture series titled Pendulum Garden (2020 - present)

Pendulum Garden has evolved out of a year-long period of intensive and repetitive walking in which the artist traced and retraced loops around a park. The series explores the idea of limbo and the body in states of motion and stasis, traversing landscapes both physical and dreamt.

'The experience of walking each day, moving through space both alone and in tandem with another, shifted between gentle routine and obsession. Through repetition, maps became imprinted and I would vividly retrace routes at night as I drifted off to sleep.'

In parallel with the reveristic wandering walk, these sculptures are made through labour intensive and often repetitive processes. Time is recorded in the seams of the work, stitched by hand.

On approaching the sculpture from the short side the object appears singular and static. Our understanding shifts as we move and the form opens out to reveal two objects matching in reflection. Lines and conduits connect containers and generate a sense of infinite movement; our eyes travelling around the form in perpetual motion.

Frances Pinnock

Between Wake and Sleep

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Royal College of Art