EXHIBITIONS
Collection of Past and Upcoming Exhibitions Featuring Ifould's Work
ANU MASTERS PROGRAM
Master of Visual Arts - Printmedia and Drawing
While completing my MAVA at Canberra School of Arts, I was introduced to copper plate etching. A combination of aquatint and drypoint processes produced several plates enabling experimentation with paper stencils and overlays in printing.
With a theme of Endangered landscape-Endangered Skills, an investigation of the influence of Agriculture on our Australian landscape, artworks were produced incorporating print, natural dyes and book making techniques.
These procedures gave me a wealth of experience in technique, and were a valuable retrain in a new medium. Since, without the facilities of the acid bath and aquatint box I have moved into another genre of art practice, recently making woodblocks to print intaglio of pokerwork.
In the field I would rather explore monoprints taken from found objects. Always on the lookout for interesting bits of metal related to an area, old mine machinery, agricultural relics, leaves and bark, often these would be impressed by hand onto paper to develop an image conceptualising the environment.
REGIONAL GALLERY EXHIBITION
FIRE-WATER-LAND
In 2021 Fran was asked to exhibit in the Regional Gallery in Leeton, NSW. Opened by Sue Vos, Events and Cultural Services Co-ordinator for the Leeton Shire Council, the highlight was an artist talk directed by Fran’s daughter Bohie Palecek. An enthralled audience listened as, prompted by Bohie, Fran related thet development of her art Practice, her achievements and disappointments in our society’s stewardship of our natural landscape.
Of recent and retrospective art work, the exhibition’s earliest piece, Quarry on Shingle Hill Way had been shortlisted for the Kalleen art show in Cowra in 2006. As the viewer proceeded around the gallery space, they were invited on a journey through twenty one years of artistic development of works on paper. In a beautifully renovated gallery space in the Heritage listed Art Deco shire buildings, the show was a success, a pleasure to work with such professional staff.
SOLO EXHIBITION AT FYRE GALLERY
WATER…water
The Artwork for “WATER… water” was completed at three field studies sites..
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On the banks of the Darling River as the flood peak slid silently by (March 2011) guest of the Marr Family, Mount Murchison, via Wilcannia
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At Jinglemoney Crossing, on the Shoalhaven River near Braidwood during cold winter days (June - July 2011)
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Beside the Wetlands of the Murray River at Culperum Research Station, S.A. while on field studies with the Canberra School of Fine Arts, ANU,and accompanying visiting artists from the Land Arts Program based in New Mexico, USA.
A complimentary body of work to “WATER… water” was made for the exhibition titled “MALLEE… maeli”, (October 2011) in the School of Fine Arts Gallery ANU.
This was exhibited in the Regional Gallery in Mildura and travelled to the United States for exhibition in New Mexico in 2012.
All this artwork is on paper, either Hahnemulhe from Germany or Saint Armand paper from Montreal, Canada. It was drawn upon or printed upon from found objects. Dyes were used from the local vegetation, often applied while the paper was moulded to a piece of corrugated iron. Sometimes surfaces have been removed, layer after layer, offering hints of lyrical landscapes, of the feeling of the wind on the skin, the light playing on water.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Cheryl Hannah, FYRE GALLERY Braidwood NSW.
“From my first meeting with Fran I knew that things of the landscape move her deeply as an artist and as an eco- environmentalist. Looking at her work for this show (WATER….water) I could feel that central to her sense of the land was the way it receives, holds and relinquishes water. Where it was dry, she shows its potential to be wet again; where it was wet she communicates the shimmer of drought never far away. Clearly her field studies over recent years have caused her to confront the possibility of endangered landscapes for herself as an artist.
Artistic endeavour is grounded in taking risks, in seeking fresh perspectives, in pushing an idea to, and sometimes past, its breaking point. WATER…water is a collection of Fran’s landscape works made by taking risks in the landscape. She has used her recent field locations as her studio. Water is her process as much, or even more, than it is her content in these works. It is possible to see how wet paper applied directly to found objects selected with her artist’s eye in some very remote places have delivered up delicious, serendipitous combinations of colour and texture.
In many of these works the paper can be perceived as a thin sculpture of the land itself, taking on both the feel and the fragility of land surfaces that are barely surviving. These works appear as an out-pouring of her thirst for new images of an ancient, fleeting, beauty in the land”
