Francis Upritchard is a fascinated and perceptive observer of people and other animals. Her works often capture behaviours and expressions that are shared across species. As primates, humans and monkeys are, of course, especially alike. Upritchard’s baboon spouses are persuasively individual – absorbed in their own thoughts and worlds, just like the rest of us.

(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)

Francis Upritchard is a fascinated and perceptive observer of people and other animals. Her works often capture behaviours and expressions that are shared across species. As primates, humans and monkeys are, of course, especially alike. Upritchard’s baboon spouses are persuasively individual – absorbed in their own thoughts and worlds, just like the rest of us.

(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)

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)