Frances Hatch
Portland, Dorset
A site-responsive plein air practice. Paintings become receptacles of an experience in the landscape. Site materials gathered are integrated with water media.
Message
Born in the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, I currently enjoy a studio on The Isle of Portland just behind the Chesil beach in Dorset, UK.
Both studio and home are a short walk from the Jurassic Coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site recognised for its outstanding rocks, fossils and landforms.
Elected to The Royal Watercolour Society in 2022.
Training:
C.C.A.T. (Cambridge) Foundation Course 1973-74
Aberystwyth University College of Wales - Hons degree in French and Visual Art 1974-78
Auditrice Libre, Ecole des Beaux Arts, Nantes 1976
Goldsmiths’ College, A.T.C. 1978-79
Wimbledon College of Art: Postgraduate- MA Printmaking 1986-89
Statement
FRANCES HATCH
artist statement
‘It is difficult to describe in words what making work feels like…other than losing my edges, feeling part of everything - and that time becomes three dimensional.’
As a child Frances painted in watercolour out on the black lands of the Isle of Ely fen. She grew into a plein-air painter simply because it was when she was outside that memorable things seemed to happen: mundane miracles like a fen blow moving through a stand of poplars or weird ice shapes lingering in the edge of a drain. Things she didn't want to forget, they made her feel different and she wanted to share them. So, she set about trying to 'catch' the elusive on paper- which never really worked...except that when she looked at what she had made- the experience rekindled into life. Noticing that flames brighten when the breeze catches them- set the direction for her core practice going forward:
Emotional responses to landscape are met with a reciprocal response from the place itself. Frances cultivates practices that support and deepen her stance: attending to the wisdom of Indigenous cultures, modern ecological thought and practices associated within what one might call contemporary animism.
Animism invites her to listen deeply to the Earth and the more-than-human world. Her intention is to be porous and available. There tends to be much hanging around. She takes onto the land as little as possible in the way of art kit. She feels her way into the material reality and into the dynamic spirit of place. Work arises with whatever happens to be alive on the day.
Frances chooses water as vehicle of transportation and integration for material and paint. Water possesses a lively, changeable spirit. It expresses itself as liquid, crystal, vapour. At times invisible, dissolved in weather, and at other times, insistently present.
She calls together the material and sensory understandings she has gathered as she integrates them with water-based paint to shape her painted responses.
FH September 2025