Fran Norton - You can do it with plastics

The following is part of the response to the You can do it with plastics request by AUB staff and students.

Fran Norton - MA Fine Art

The Derma Series, 2008, polymer clay

Literally drawing in, into and on the physical environment, my mark-making develops the interrelation of sculpture, found object and artist with the material world, and provides a means to decipher my own impulses and needs.  Arising from the multiple roles, activities and environments of everyday life, my work references motherhood, gender, abjection and the body.  I aspire to have no delineation between life and work.  For me the personal is wholly integrated with creative practice as I give tangible form to my obsessions, thoughts and emotions. 

Thinking about what I am sensing and feeling at the point of creation, I recognise core elements registering externally in my methods, imagery, form, process and behaviour. Associating these with the balance of the controlled and uncontrolled, conscious and unconscious, innate and attained, led the path of my research to Neuroscience.  I have been concerned with what really happens, in terms of physiology and cognition, when we make or respond to art and the universality of  'art as behaviour'.  

Using strategies of reversal, sculpting and burning I transformed the insubstantial into palpable objects engaging with real space.  Developing the gesture as a form of printing, I squeezed, caressed, moulded and baked materials chosen for personal resonance including found geology, wax, plants, hair, porcelain and polymer clays.  Reconciling process, material and mode of presentation with subject, my own imprint, visceral connection and process of ‘touch’ became an essential part of the work. The tactile spines, skins and fleshy forms that resulted, are imbued with a sense of body and self that summon up contradictory associations and my own compulsive behaviour.

The Derma Series, 2008, polymer clay

The Derma Series, 2008, polymer clay