Dancers

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Are these dancers holy fools, and if so what does that make us? Francis Upritchard first exhibited Dancers as part of her pavilion, Save yourself, at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Three tables of handmade figures, including Dancers, were presented in three opulent eighteenth-century rooms of the Palazzo Smith Mangilli Valmarana. Each table was built to match the width and height of the burnished mirror in its exhibition room.

At Venice, Yellow dancer held his purple shawl over his shoulders like Yoda and gazed at his own reflection in the mirror. Subsequently, in a short video for the Tate, Upritchard referred to her sculptures as ‘holy fools’ and ‘bereft’ of meaning.1 This makes the allure of Yellow dancer and his kin more beguiling. The time-stamp of Dancers is indeterminate. Their wizened faces resemble those of Bog People, preserved in peat and dredged up from the past. Upritchard’s influences range from Erasmus Grasser’s fifteenth-century wooden sculptures of morris dancers to photographs of hippies at the Glastonbury Festival in 1971. Her figures were made from modelling material sculpted over wire frames, then painted in Day-Glo colours evoking the psychedelia of the modern music festival. Perched on a cushion, the stout Psychic pushing is Smurf-blue, while the unusual cap of Eel dancer is reminiscent of a medieval wimple.

Upritchard first became known for mining the history of museology by recategorising objects past and present and scrambling art and craft. She turned cigarette butts into necklaces, recycled fur coats into monkeys and sloths, and carved hockey sticks into Nile crocodiles. Cultures collided in exotic and problematic new artefacts like her sculptures of shrivelled Pākehā heads, which provoked associations with the nineteenth-century trade in toi moko, preserved Māori heads. Then in 2006 she turned her attention to figurative sculptures inspired by 1960s hippie counter-culture.

Her Dancers are grouped together like a community but do not interact with one another; instead they are placed around the perimeter of the table to be inspected by the viewer. Each nude dancer looks either Zen-like or vacant, depending on your world view. Poised beside handblown glass lights, Upritchard’s ‘holy fools’ are suspended somewhere between heaven and hell, here and now.

Megan Dunn