Frances Gynn

Frances Gynn works from Devon, in painting, print and staged public interventions. Her subject is what remains: a species after its habitat is gone, a landscape after plastic has entered it, a mark after the hand that made it has moved on.

Public Erasure is a series of live performances in which Gynn invites the public to erase her own paintings of endangered species — hare, turtle dove, mountain gorilla, natterjack toad — brushstroke by brushstroke, in front of her. Gynn has described the result as "a visceral and intellectual experience," one that leaves participants confronting, quite literally, their own part in a disappearance.

Plastic runs through the work at a material level, not just a thematic one. In her paintings, Gynn presses found plastic waste — bottle caps, packaging, fragments collected from beaches and hedgerows — directly into the paint surface, imprinting its texture into the finished work.

Gynn trained originally in graphic design before turning to fine art, and her printmaking retains something of that early discipline: economy of line, attention to the plate as much as the image. It sits against looser, more built-up paintings, the two modes trading off across a single body of work.

Her work has been shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the John Moores Painting Prize, and selected for the Derwent Art Prize and the RWA Annual Open. She was elected Academician of the Royal West of England Academy in 2019 — a track record that has placed her among the more closely watched painters working in environmental subject matter.

STUDIO: DEVON, UK