Frances Hatch

Next major exhibition:

Saturday 24 June to Sunday 3 September 2017

Frances is developing a new body of work to show in the gallery…

A few words of introduction by the artist:’The moon is going to play a large part in this emerging collection: it seems to have ‘called me out’ to paint as it rises and sets all along the Chesil – and indeed wherever I’ve been- over this last year. I will offer moon light mixed with the earths of each place. I have come to experience each moon as if different from the last one. I’ve given them names associated with something touching my experience at the time. 

There is something special about being present to the changes of the lunar calendar, tides, seasonal plants and daily shifts of light and weather. My work is all about being present in the landscape with what ‘is’. Through creative engagement I ‘get to grips’ (literally!) with what is going on and explore my connection with it. The show will be accompanied by a book- juxtaposing images and words associated with the gestation of this particular body of work.

FRANCES HATCH developed her plein air practice – not only to make work outdoors but to involve the materials she finds around her in the landscape, collecting earth, rocks, minerals and litter to use as her palette. Wild fruit juices, puddle mud and raindrops bespeckle her sketchbooks. Armed simply with paper and a portable toolkit containing some gouache, watercolour or acrylic paint and a binding medium, Frances heads off to beaches and headlands in Dorset, Devon and the North West Highlands of Scotland to create her response to the time she spends in these wild places using materials she finds there.

Frances Hatch studied visual art at Cambridge, Aberystwyth and Goldsmiths and has an MA in printmaking from Wimbledon College of Art. She has always painted outdoors. Her work has grown in strength and confidence following a trip to Antarctica in 2005 followed by a Research Bursary from DVA/ExLab which supported her study of the history and craft of making and consolidating pigments. She has been a senior tutor at West Dean College since 1995, has published books about her projects and contributed to other books both as an illustrator and practitioner. She has exhibited throughout the UK and in London and had her first show at Sladers Yard in 2015. Frances was awarded the Shenzhen International Watercolour Biennial Prize at the  Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (RI) exhibition at the Mall Galleries 2016: ‘An award to encourage innovation and experimentation in contemporary watermedia.’ She and her husband now live just up the coast at Burton Bradstock. Her is now working towards her exhibition here at Sladers Yard this summer 2017.