B.

Francis Upritchard’s baboon-ish Husband and Wife are like animals from an imaginary zoo, though their expressions may have been borrowed from the human visitors who come to stare at the beasts. Husband, absorbed with his own cleverness, does not mind such attention; Wife seems less comfortable, cringing under the viewers’ gaze.

Based in London, Upritchard is a sculpture graduate (1998) from the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts. Since her first exhibition in London in 2000, she has shown in many different parts of the world.

(Beasts, 2015)

Francis Upritchard’s baboon-ish Husband and Wife are like animals from an imaginary zoo, though their expressions may have been borrowed from the human visitors who come to stare at the beasts. Husband, absorbed with his own cleverness, does not mind such attention; Wife seems less comfortable, cringing under the viewers’ gaze.

Based in London, Upritchard is a sculpture graduate (1998) from the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts. Since her first exhibition in London in 2000, she has shown in many different parts of the world.

(Beasts, 2015)

The work on the three tables at the centre of this room is part of a series of sculptures artist Francis Upritchard has described as “an attempt at an unsuccessful utopia”. Like the flipped-back word in its title, it seems to set off in one direction – towards a kind of visionary, psychedelic paradise – but overturns our expectations to arrive somewhere much less certain. Locked away in intensely private reveries, the delicate, marionette-like figures that inhabit it are curiously enigmatic: part-primeval bog people, part-countercultural prophets, they live out their radiant existences somewhere between the ancient unknowable past and the distant unknowable future.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)

Francis Upritchard is better known for her large figurative sculptures, but some of the first things she made were domestically scaled ceramics. As a child in New Plymouth her family knew several potters, and she and her siblings were sometimes allowed to add their own small pieces into the wood kilns during firings. In recent years, Upritchard has collaborated with a number of professional New Zealand potters, creating works that both draw on, and undermine, the traditions of functional stoneware. Here, she disrupts and reanimates the familiar, functional form of the ceramic tankard, a drinking vessel that has existed almost unchanged since medieval times.

(We do this, 12 May 2018 - 26 May 2019)

This work consists of two tankards of different sizes. One is 200 x 180 x 145 centimetres, the other is 170 x 195 x 140 centimetres