London, Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, The Ingram Prize 2024, 14 – 17 November 2024;
Woking, Lightbox Gallery, Frances Pinnock: Light Sleeper, 15 November 2025 – 18 January 2026
‘Light Sleeper’ shifts between sculpture, painting and drawing, employing leather both as a material for creating form and as a surface for painting. Two panels have been hand stitched together with horsehair and then worked into with tools, leaving gestural impressions in the surface. Iron sulphate has been painted in layers and sealed with shellac lacquer. The inky, abstract and looping marks recall a nocturnal space of sleep and dream. A brass ball balances in a small indentation on the top edge – a movable proxy for the sun and for wakefulness.
“My works explore temporal and material junctures and act as a place for reflection and revisitation – blending impressions from personal narrative, memory, emotion and dream. Through making I experience the interplay between states of focused attention and reverie, and sculptures often engender tension between movement and stillness. Working compositionally with organic materials including leather, vellum and horsehair, I use found objects and metallic elements in juxtaposition. Technical processes of pattern cutting and hand stitching underpin my making and works draw from a breadth of reference including art history, literature, puppetry, music, dance, and garment making.”
