Dr Fran Norton is an artist and MA Senior Lecturer of Illustration, Fine Art and Drawing. Her diverse creative practice ranges from traditional mark-making on paper to collecting, documenting, sorting and re-presenting everyday textual archives. The ‘drawings’ that result attempt to articulate the embodied experiences of today’s artist-woman as shaped by shifting socio-political spaces and dialogues.
Most recently, Fran has been collaborating with Lisa Richardson on The Non Fluid Body. This experimental arts project emerged through talking, laughing, drawing, making and lecturing alongside one another. It aims to investigate creative strategies of potential use to others.
Current debates around gender fluidity, biology and sexuality are complex and require sensitivity. Aging women have long been under-represented artistically, politically, philosophically, academically and culturally. Negative associations prevail of the menopause as problematic, barren, dried-up and unproductive.
Both menopausal women-artists, Lisa and Fran wish to celebrate this potentially liberating phase of life as a rich arena for transformative experience and artistic enquiry.
