Frances Gynn

Frances Gynn is an artist whose expressive, process-led paintings explore deforestation, pollution and our relationship with the natural world. Working between painting, drawing and print from her studio in Devon, she builds surfaces slowly — layering paint, working back into it with resists and sanding, referencing the specimen labels and botanical language of natural history.

In her paintings, Gynn makes acrylic castings of found and domestic single-use plastic waste — packaging and objects collected from beaches and households — peeling off the acrylic, which embodies the ridges and type that translates, for Gynn, into “a plastic language,” which she then builds into the paint surface of the work, as seen in her large-scale studies of a single flower, rendered with quiet precision and care.

Frances is well known for her public erasure performances, in which the public are invited to erase her own drawings of endangered species — extending this same enquiry into live encounter. Gynn has described the result as "a visceral and intellectual experience," one that leaves participants confronting, quite literally, their own part in a disappearance.

Gynn graduated in Fine Art from the University of Plymouth, and her work has been shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the John Moores Painting Prize, selected for the Derwent Art Prize and the RWA Annual Open — alongside her election as a Royal West of England Academician in 2019. She is a Fellow of the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy.

Studio: Devon, UK