Francis Upritchard

The influences on Upritchard's figurative sculptures are various: the figures in the Bayeux tapestry, Japanese Noh theatre, 1960s psychedelic portraiture, Grasser's wooden figures, the bronze figures of the Chola dynasty, court jesters and medieval performers.

Writers about these works often reference counter-cultural movements, hippies, shamans and marionettes when describing them.

Comparisons have been made to the earlier work of Bruce Conner and Paul Thek and Upritchard's closer contemporaries Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch and Saya Woolfalk.

Upritchard often collaborates with furniture designer Martino Gamper (also her husband) on the plinths her sculpted forms stand on, which sometimes take the forms of tables and bureaus, and more recently of steel pedestals.

Natalie Hegert writes:

"The care taken in the aesthetic choices of furniture reveals Upritchard’s interest in craft, further evidenced by her attention to textiles, lamps, jewelry, urns, and other accoutrements. In Upritchard’s sculpture, it is not enough for the figure to be sculpted from clay and set upright—the drapery, adornment, and environment related to the figure are integral to the work itself."

Francis Upritchard (born in 1976) is a New Zealand contemporary artist based in London.

Upritchard graduated from the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, School of Fine Arts in 1997.

She had initially thought to study painting, but became interested in sculpture during her first year.

Soon after graduating, Upritchard moved to London.

Upritchard's early work often referenced museum displays, collections of artefacts, and ancient cultures.

She often combined found objects with her own hand-made additions, such as sculpted heads made from modelleing clay of dogs, monkeys and birds inserted into the necks of ceramic and glass vessels, or fastened onto pieces of sporting equipment like hockey sticks and cricket bats.

Other works showed faux-antique delicate instruments in shabby velvet-lined boxes.

She also became known for her sculptures that replicated shrunken heads, resting on display cabinets or mounted on small pedestals.

Made of plaster and paper mache, the heads referenced mokomokai, tattooed shrunken heads made by New Zealand's indigenous Māori, but the features were those of Pākeha peoples.

In December 2001, Upritchard co-founded an artist-run space, the Bart Wells Institute, with fellow artist Luke Gottelier in a semi-derelict Hackney warehouse.

The Bart Wells Institute ran for about two years and exhibitions were curated by artists including Sam Basu, Brian Griffiths, David Thorpe and Harry Pye.

In 2003 Upritchard was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures prize for an installation titled Save Yourself, now in the Saatchi Gallery collection.

The installation, featuring a small mummy figure, wrapped in rags lying on the floor vibrating and moaning, surrounded by canopic jars, was shown at the Bart Wells Institute.

The work was seen by Beck's Future selector Michael Landy, who nominated it for the award.

The work was seen by collector Charles Saatchi and the nomination and acquisition were Upritchard's career break-through.

In 2005 Upritchard had her first exhibition in New Zealand, Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed at Artspace, Auckland.

The previous year her work had been shown at City Gallery Wellington in the survey exhibition of recent New Zealand contemporary art Prospect: New New Zealand Art.

In 2006/2007, Upritchard decided to start exploring the human figure in her work.

Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed was nominated for the 2006 Walters Prize, hosted by Auckland Art Gallery and Upritchard was selected as the winner by judge Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.

In her citation Christov-Bakargiev wrote:

"I had seen images of Upritchard's work, and of some of the other finalists' works, previous to experiencing this exhibition. But I had never seen the work in the flesh. The difference is astounding. Upritchard's work resists photography and reproduction, and this too, in the age of overwhelming communications and surveillance technology, gives me a good feeling, somewhat of an escape route."

In 2008 New Zealand's public arts funding body Creative New Zealand announced that two artists would represent New Zealand at the 2009 Venice Biennale: Upritchard and painter Judy Millar.

Upritchard's work for the Biennale consisted of a number of sculptural installations displayed in the former private residence, the Fondazione Claudio Buziol.

Titled Save Yourself, the works showed dreamy or dancing figures displayed on hand-made tables, mixed with ceramic lamps.

It was the first time Upritchard mixed figures and furniture in such a way, an approach which has become a signature aspect of her current work.

The figures, handbuilt from polymer clay, stand about 50 centimetres tall.

Usually naked, or adorned with handmade and hand-dyed cloaks and textile wrappers, they are painted variously in solid block colours or patterns, including Harlequin blocks and grids.

The artist said of these works:

"I want to create a visionary landscape, which refers to the hallucinatory works of the medieval painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, and simultaneously draws on the utopian rhetoric of post-sixties counterculture, high modernist futurism and the warped dreams of survivalists, millenarians, and social exiles."

In 2009, she represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale.

In a 2012 newspaper profile she said: 'I didn't think there was so much good figurative work in contemporary sculpture.

[...] I went to Munich and saw [the 15th-century sculptor] Erasmus Grasser's Morris Dancers.' Upritchard's figures are made of polymer clay laid over wire armatures; their skin is painted in everything from neutral tones to brightly coloured grids, and they are variously naked and clothed in robes and gowns, also made by the artist.

Curator Anne Ellegood writes:

"Some hail from long-ago eras—protagonists of medieval mythology like the knight, the harlequin, the jester—while others are from the more recent past—beatniks, hippies, and other nonconformists. Various figures are identified by their vocation—music teacher, potato seller, psychic—or distilled to a primary, and often less than laudatory, characteristic, such as “liar,” “misanthrope,” “ninny,” or “nincompoop.”"