Francesca Schwartz

Artist Statement

My artwork is an ongoing investigation of corporeality, femaleness, evolution, impermanence and disappearance. I explore these and related themes employing a range of media, using processes that relate to and reflect them.

Materiality is a core concern in my work, as I am endlessly fascinated by the composition of the body and its contents. This has led me to use processes including painting, drawing, printing, sculpture, photography, collage, assemblage, and installation, often in combinatory ways, and materials ranging from dyes, wax, bone, textiles, found objects, photographs, and most recently fire. I like some materials for their precision, others because of their elusiveness. Once in hand, alchemy takes over, and what happens is unexpected. So it goes as the unconscious emerges.

In an effort to embrace the language and inscriptions of the body, I follow the word, the image, the symbol—chosen from the known world and from the unexpected, the buried, the obscure. The body is marked again and again; I echo these processes by tearing apart, unraveling, and desecrating, burning. I merge and pin down disparate elements and materials that somehow need one another to function as composite wholes. Composition and installation allow for and accentuate these generative and regenerative modes of working. The results of my processes are generally abstract, but the implied presence of bodies, in whole or in part, is always apparent.

We begin and end in our bodies, our ancestral homes that bear the secrets and rhythms of our existence. We cannot know the body until we contemplate its disappearance. The body is a home, and as a seat of memory, it is a consummate historian. My meditations on the body are expressions of the layered meanings of femaleness, and of how the female body is a mystery of symbols and inscriptions. I am drawn to what is inside a woman, inside myself, hoping to access a story or a history.