Frances Mary Driscoll was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1999. She is an interdisciplinary, multilingual artist whose practice is rooted in collage (as both process-based methodology and pure aesthetic device), though her work often begins with drawing and writing before spanning moving image, dance, installation, book making, and printmaking.
Her key concerns centre on the reproduction of images, and how various tropes and strategies have emerged within filmic, artistic, and capitalist convention, particularly in the twentieth century. In cyclically refining her work, she has developed a stylised, formalist visual grammar that evades an immediate reading, instead engaging the audience intellectually (and sometimes physically) to interpret and decipher what they see or hear. Her artistic research looks at how culture is continually borrowed and appropriated, and how the act of reworking both static and moving images, as well as words and music, can be used to examine modes of representation, critique tensions between language and image, and play with a collapse of ‘the original’ through de- then re-contextualisation.
short excerpt entitled 'jo: prenez la photo !' taken from degree show film 'step-toe, klepto // or tease'. Reworking of a pre-existing film with French subtitles.
('step-toe, klepto // or tease', 18 minute, four-channel digital film, colour and sound, 2022)
Below are selected collage works, on paper and digital film made 2021-22.
Adjacent: Low-resolution moving image gif: selected digital scans from 'CODEX' 108-page artist book, mixed media on paper, handbound with waxed linen thread. Each page 15 x 21 cm, total height 3cm.
Moving image GIF of 16-page artist book 'Yoked Pullover'. digital scans of double page spreads: photomontage on sugar paper, handbound with waxed linen thread. Each page 15 x 21 cm, total height 0.5cm.
Scanned pages feature in the work 'step-toe, klepto // or tease'.
'step-toe, klepto // or tease' is a four-channel film work with sound. It collages and recontextualises moving image clips alongside digital scans of 2-D collages, with a focus on gesture, movement, running and dance, to create a rhythmic and dynamic video piece. Using 'beats' to align and disalign image with sound, it playfully merges midcentury cinema excerpts, a hip-hop sample breakdown, televised music performances and a late nineties fish advert with clips from performances by the artist.
Using the notion of ‘b-roll’ (supplementary footage which intercuts the main footage of a film) as an aesthetic and conceptual device, the film is a collaged exploration of gesture-based movement, drawing on existing film footage and self-generated material which references particular imagery and filmic conventions. Various paper ephemera related to the film such as handbound artist-books with stills and drawings, and risograph transcripts of the work’s audio sit alongside secondary research material, displayed on wooden table integrated in the wooden display screen stand. The audience is encouraged to pick these up to browse and read.
(poster for 'step-toe, klepto // or tease' is a four colour a3 risograph on sugarpaper).