Up-and-coming Upritchard

Artist to watch Francis Upritchard features in the 48th issue of Object magazine. “An exciting talent … Upritchard’s art locates value in the personal and the imperfect … [She] finds a way of accommodating beauty, rendering it approachable, a part of life, freeing it of conspicuousness and convention.” The Ilam graduate is now based in London, where she has set up the Bart Wells Institute (an emerging artists’ gallery collective) with friend and fellow artist Luke Gottelier. “It is hard to make art on your own, and in NZ you are very much alone,” she explained in a NZ Herald interview. “[But] my family is here, and I want to suck NZ back into me because I’m a colonial in England. My friends forget about that, but I need to stay different, I need to stay a visitor.” (December 25-March 26)