Francesca Mollett
In October 2023, we welcomed Francesca Mollett to the Roberts Institute of Art Residency.
Francesca used her time in residence to explore the perception and representation of light effects and natural phenomena. She took inspiration from the surrounding landscape and was the first resident to make use of our new residency studio to work on a body of paintings for an upcoming solo exhibition.
Francesca is a UK-based artist who makes paintings that reflect on space, abstraction and detail. Focusing on specific elements of an environment or place, such as doorways and glossy and reflective surfaces on buildings, she creates compositions that are abstractions from and atmospheric evocations of these details.
While in residence, Francesca reflected on looking itself and how to translate multiple viewpoints into painting. From Poussin to lichen, she investigated the abstraction of figures and motifs, as well as how we perceive surfaces and light effects.
Francesca was the inaugural artist in our new studio space, where she was painting throughout the residency in preparation for her solo exhibition at GRIMM gallery in New York in Spring 2024. She drew on the surrounding landscape, sketching with pencil, graphite and watercolour directly outside and then found ways to evoke the experience of being in the landscape back in the studio with oil on canvas. She became interested in the different ways of observing and describing something in these two spaces and how the different materials informed how she looked and described.
Guiding her residency and the paintings she made was her reading and research into the phenomenon of iridescence, the ways we perceive texture and surface and how painting can compel us to think about looking itself.
This idea had emerged from her research into lichen and moss, both in the surrounding area and through a visit to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, where she met bryologist Neil Bell, visited the Botanical Library with the director of Inverleith House, Emma Nicholson and studied the drawings of lichens by Robert Kaye Greville.
She took the reproductive systems of mosses — when it releases a spore, it stops growing, and a new one begins — as a conceptual basis for thinking about how one painting can germinate another: ‘I felt this helped with thinking about how my paintings can grow from each other; I can work on one to a point, and then rather than resolving it all, begin a new one from an idea germinated during the other.
Francesca also joined the British Lichen Society for a walk at Kinnoull Hill, the members sharing their knowledge on how to identify lichen through their various shapes and textures by studying them up-close. Francesca took with her this close-looking into the studio, where she observed and worked from materials found in the grounds or on nearby walks. Like lichen, many of these surfaces and materials involved an expansion or variegation of surface.
The paintings of Nicolas Poussin were another subject Francesca wanted to research while in residence. At the Scottish National Galleries she met up with chief curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, Aidan Weston-Lewis. Together they looked at how time plays out in Poussin’s paintings, allowing for multiple points of focus to coexist. Francesca was interested in how his set of paintings ‘Seven Sacraments’ (Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Ordination and Marriage) was designed to be displayed one at a time in a series and as a sequence. This inspired Francesca to think about how individual paintings can relate to one another in one body of painting.
Francesca welcomed students from the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design for a workshop in the residency grounds and studio. Together they spent time drawing outside, engaging with sculptural works from the David and Indrė Collection, including previous RIA resident Jesse Wine’s Non-Fiction (2021), and the surrounding landscape. The workshop enabled both Francesca and the students to share their experiences of what might ordinarily be a solitary practice of drawing. The discussed how they observed and described what was before them, comparing mark-making and approaches to looking.
Reflecting on her time in residence and research interests, Francesca created a visual essay, drawing together her thoughts around natural phenomena and the cultural influences that have impacted her work.
Reading was another important element of Francesca’s residency, which allowed her to expand her practice and work through her ideas. You can read her thoughts on six books that are shaping her current thinking, research and practice here.
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