Francis Upritchardc/o Kate McGarry
"We may exercise our taste, deciding whether these are beautiful or ugly objects, but installed in the gallery they adopt the neutral status of museological display. They are simply a material fact, their meaning forced entirely into how they look, and isolated from possible utilitarian contexts. That they are bad copies, or poisoned versions, of ancient realities is a cue to reconsider the ethics of cultural colonialism and the divisive role of the ethnographic artefact."
"Perhaps these fragments shore the artist up against her own ruin. A gift from a relative, an unwanted wedding present or a generic tourist souvenir--even the tackiest ornament once played a small symbolic function in someone's life. Upritchard repurposes these materials to reveal their underlying purpose--to personalize and decorate our domestic spaces and to fabricate memories which can offset our knowledge of our own impending death."
"Upritchard's is an art of falsifying information. Appropriating readymade artefacts, hexing the viewer's imagination to wilfully reinterpret: a car boot sale cookie jar as a mysterious ancient urn, tacky tourist shop paraphernalia as prize trophies from a long lost empire. Upritchard's a magpie Indiana Jones: inventing creepies and curses from stuff that probably exists in your attic."
