Francis Upritchard
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1976
rainwob ii
- 2008
- Modelling material, metal, paint, glass and ceramic
- Purchased with the support of Christchurch City Council's Challenge Grant to the Christchurch Art Gallery Trust, 2010.
- 1650 x 1520 x 1000mm
- 2010/047:a-bb
Tags: bottles, lamps (lighting devices), people (agents), tables (support furniture)
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)