FRANCES GREENOUGH
Frances Greenough, Lake Minnewanka, |
Frances Greenough’s practice has always centered on the subject of landscape, whether it be the real landscapes that surround us or fictional landscapes she creates. Her love of landscape stems from her parents and their keen interest in walking and mountaineering. These interests have now become her own and Frances is an active walker and climber. Her earlier paintings were invented through a process of collage using collected images from tourist brochures, magazines, books and her own photographs. Through collage Frances aimed to create a landscape that is believable, but the idyllic, mountainous scenes she presented often hinted to their invented nature. An exchange trip to Canada, whilst Frances was studying at the Royal College of Art led to a new way of working, which explored the mixing of the photographic image with the painted image. The time Frances spent in Canada gave her an insight into how another culture views and uses their landscape, the experience was heightened by the vast difference and the scale of the plain lands and the Rocky Mountains compared to the landscape of her native England. |
Frances is currently in a period of transition, having made the life changing decision to move to Tavistock on the edge of the Dartmoor National Park, from the edge of London where she has lived most of her life. This vast change in environment has led to a reassessment of her practice. Dartmoor is a place of wild beauty and its bareness shows the history of the land openly. Since moving to Devon, Frances has felt more of a connection to the landscape she is living in and due to this her previous use of photography has been abandoned, opting instead to make sketches in situ. She hopes that this more intimate way of making work will help her to better understand her own and the human relationship with landscape and why she fixates so strongly on it as a subject.
Click here for Frances Greenough's website
FRANCES GREENOUGH'S CONVERSATIONS AND INTERACTIONS:
Anyone Allowed Anywhere, a project with Dan Lovelace