Fran ‘made herself at home’ as resident artist at The Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon College of Arts. The results of her activity included adhesive vinyls on the windows and sounds emanating from corners, but the most engaging works appeared as enlarged soundwaves that on closer inspection were revealed to be thousands upon thousands of text messages. Time was stretched and compressed as 5 years of brief conversations originally discarded in an instant were re-read for days, then reduced into wallpaper to be viewed at once or pored over at length. Alphabetical sorting and centering emphasised the repetitions of professional, creative and domestic roles as blocks of appointments, supermarket orders and courier deliveries arose in the flow. Smaller works picked out persistent familial demands like ‘Can you….’, ‘Could you…’ and ‘Where r u’, or focused on selected periods of text chat with teenage sons that revealed Fran’s specific relationships with each. The largest piece spanning 5 metres of the back wall was redacted by heavily worked graphite drawing and resonated with questions of privacy and hidden boundaries. Shining like precious metal, the obscured and indented sign-offs, arguments, names and personal comments between Fran and her husband suggested we slow down, think again and look more closely at the everyday spaces of home we carry with us.
