Issue 7, Profiles

Francesca Mollett

Floating Specificity: Strategies of coming apart to come together

Words MARCUS CIVIN

Photography LAURA STEVENS

The window and fence need paint. So do faces, some think. What were the Lascaux caves and Jesus’ last meal before people painted them? How much of what we know about ourselves, our aspirations, where we live, and each other have we put together by looking at marked and altered surfaces and definite edges? Francesca Mollett’s work asks whether we have come to resemble that history—whether it has defined our self-conceptions, our relationships, and where we decide to start and stop.

Born in 1991, the painter Francesca Mollett lives and works in London. She received her master’s in painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2020 after also studying at London’s Wimbledon College of Art and the Royal Drawing School. Biology and other natural phenomena often inspire her complex, watery abstractions. She grew up in the English countryside in West Sussex, raised by two writer-parents near the hills that make up the South Downs. Although she likes being in the city and around people, one of her favorite paintings is a panel from a 15th century Italian altarpiece by Giovanni di Paolo in the collection of London’s National Gallery that shows Saint John the Baptist heading off alone, leaving chimneys and fortified walls for a leafier, hillier, less constructed life.

Last year, Mollett put together a trio of solo exhibitions—each one on a different continent. The writer Marie Heilich felt the work in her winter showing at Micki Meng in San Francisco called to mind living tissue, moisture, ripples, and pools. The following fall, while three works from the San Francisco show and three new ones hung at Pond Society in Shanghai, another writer, Bryony Bodimeade, commented on Mollett’s skillful play with fluidity, mass, swelling, and spilling. The summer between, other paintings at Grimm Gallery’s Amsterdam location considered the glossy painted doors along the city’s canals. The reflections in the doors became like water, making the representations of the doors themselves resemble canals.

Mollett has a way of letting big ideas drop casually. I spoke with her on a video call while she was on a residency at the Roberts Institute of Art in Scotland. She mentioned her interest in hydrofeminism and thoughts about lichen, which is abundant in Scotland. Lichen absorbs what’s in the air. “We are always absorbing everything too,” she explained. “We are porous. We think we’re separate, but we’re not. I think we can learn other ways of being, like lichen’s way of being. There’s something about that we could take to heart maybe.”

Lichen—that mossy-mushroomy-looking stuff you see on trees—results from symbiotic relationships between fungi, algae, and/or bacteria, almost like a union of aquatic life and life on land. Maybe 30,000 species of lichen cover about six percent of the earth’s surface. Lichen has been around forever and can live thousands of years. It shows up on every continent, including Antarctica and also in the desert. According to the British Lichen Society, it requires light, water, and a carbon source and is generally considered an indicator of good air quality. Mollett finds it amazingly adaptable, given its ability to tolerate dry conditions by going dormant and then bounce back when conditions improve. If anywhere far out in space is habitable, we will know first because scientists are testing lichen to find out.