Francis Whorrall-Campbell (UK, 1985)
Residency period: September-November 2024
Rather unexpectedly, I took up ceramics at La Becque. I had proposed to continue my research into the trans-species history of HRT, but instead of producing a text about the history of conjugated equine oestrogen, I made a series of clay horses modeled after ‘My Little Pony’ toys. It was a pleasure to be able to play with material and indulge a more child-like approach to making. One outcome perhaps of my intention-setting drawing made at the start of the residency which declared, ‘HAVE FUN: Desire, Dedication, Devotion, Discipline.’
I also made a series of ceramic knives, contained in a lush pink-lined cutlery canteen. These were inspired by a passage from Jean Genet’s essay ’The Criminal Child’, in which tin knives made by imprisoned children come to focus a conversation about real and symbolic violence, as enacted by handmade objects and fantasies. I expanded this more in a text, pinned to the wall by another (real) knife. Alongside these ’symbolic knives’, I also proposed an ‘actual knife’ – a Swiss army knife I stole and engraved with the letters M.A.V. (referencing the anarchist slogan ‘mort aux vaches’). I am less resolved on the force of this ready-made, but I want to draw attention to it here to consider the ways in which objects fail, and in failing as artworks (failing to be elevated to the aesthetic) perhaps they function in other, more useful ways. Perhaps this is the kind of ‘better failure’ that Samuel Beckett invited – close, but no cigar. — Francis Whorrall-Campbell
Francis Whorrall-Campbell (b. 1995) is an artist, writer, and sometimes art critic from the UK. Working across text, sculpture, and the digital, their work undertakes a materialist investigation of sexual subjectivity. Guided by research into the pasts and presents of gender transition, a relationship between making an artwork and making a (gendered) self emerges as a method of thinking critically about how identities and desires are formed in interaction with the world and narratives around them.
Francis Whorrall-Campbell, La Becque, 2024, photo Matthieu Croizier and Aurélien Haslebacher