An Unbound

Frances Scott
Residency at 161, London
August 2009


Frances Scott's work explores the translation of the story through collective and personal experience, and the act of retelling as a way to alter and split a narrative. She is interested in processes to remember events and landscapes, and epic spaces that are reconfigured to draw them close to a human scale. Her work takes form through drawing, projections, discrete objects and installation, and proposes a tension between the fictional and real, between intention and accident. She has shown in solo and group exhibitions in the UK and last year in New York.

Over two days and nights at 161, Frances will develop themes explored in two recent interlinking pieces Audience Chamber and Insomnias, that respond to the practice and visual legacy of Selenography, the study and mapping of the lunar landscape; in particular the naked eye drawings and diagrams circa 16th century that pre-date more sophisticated optics. This reference is coupled with a chapter from W.G Sebald's 'Austerlitz', in which an un-named character, suffering from insomnia, spends his nights in an observatory built into the roof of this house in order to devote himself to his astronomical studies.

Frances will look at the idea of an absent Selenographer working the other side of the clock, where the image made at night time becomes a replacement for sleep. What does it mean to represent a state of insomnia as a picture, as something plural and repeated? How can the body itself become the machine to record, the hand, a needle of a seismograph or monitor that registers a disruption? Using a range of methods - night-vision camera, sound recording, and image diaries - the nocturnal house (and its sleeping inhabitant) will be observed and projected back.
www.abyme.org.uk