Fran Norton

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. For me the personal is wholly integrated with creative practice as I give tangible form to my obsessions and emotions.

Natural characteristics, repetitive impulses and orderly tendencies resonate throughout my visual language. Associating these with the balance of the controlled and uncontrolled, conscious and unconscious, innate and attained, led the path of my research to Neuroscience. Studying these notions, 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' .

My work arises from the multiple roles, activities and environments of my everyday life and deals with motherhood, gender, abjection and the body. The 'hairification' pieces reference instinct, body, gender behaviour and abject reflexive responses and derive from a maternal role, nit combing.

Neither fully dead nor fully alive, hair has made the journey from inside to out. Pared down to varnish and a few...

2011 - MA Fine Art (Distinction) The Arts University College, Bournemouth
2008 - PgDip Fine Art (Distinction) Byam Shaw, St. Martins School of Art, London