Presented as part of Hatched: National Graduate Show 2024, the Hatched artist-in-residence program offers a month-long residency to one WA-based and one interstate artist in the Hatched exhibition. This opportunity provides time, space and a new context to develop their practice, embark on new projects, and be a part of PICA’s creative community.  

Frances Malcomson will use drawing and frottage methodologies to interpret Western Australian endemic wildflowers alongside non-endemic weed and garden species. Inspired by the concept of novel eco-systems, interwoven species that disorder and re-wild city sites, she will create a novel eco-system on papers.  With media including pencils, charcoals and inks, repetitive mark-making and removal will nuance tonalities from intensely darkened to faded.  Any wear and tear of fragile papers will speak to environmental vulnerability.  

Malcomson will progressively juxtapose and layer papers into one expansive work, attachment speaking to hope for environmental repair. Through further mark-making, boundaries will be traversed, tonalities intensified. Offering a dance between enhancement and diminishment, the created novel eco-system will summarize the contradictory flourishing and vulnerability of adaptive botanical nature.