Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Frances Lightbound. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Frances, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

It’s hard to choose a single project, but in a personal sense, my recent residency and solo show at the John David Mooney Foundation in Chicago comes to mind. This was my first major public project following the pandemic, and after my recovery from an accident in 2019. After the world turned upside down for a few years – personally, professionally, and globally – it was exciting and generative to have the opportunity to develop and share a big new body of work. I showed work developed from 2022–23, including sculpture, prints, site-specific installation and works on paper. Rather than single pieces, I usually prefer to develop constellations of work that speak to each other, and this was a perfect opportunity to do that. My residency gave me time to develop some of the work in the gallery space itself – to build installations that crept into the corners of the building’s architecture, encouraging visitors to let their attention expand beyond the white cube.

While preparing for my show, I had also worked on curatorial projects at the Foundation with two Ukrainian artists in residence – Aliona Solomadina and Valeriia Tarasenko – both of whom traveled to the US following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The John David Mooney Foundation is an artist-run space that’s been in operation for over 40 years, centered on a model of a collaborative workspace and laboratory, and is perhaps the last remaining artist-run space in a neighborhood that was once an artistic hub for Chicago. It’s one of the only – or perhaps the only? – live/work residencies that I know of within the city itself, and supports artists in developing and showing boundary-pushing new work. It also has a history of supporting projects at the intersection of art and architecture, which is very much in line with my own interests.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m an artist, educator and curator based in Chicago, where I teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I’m originally from Sheffield, England. My work has been shown nationally and internationally in a variety of nonprofit, commercial and artist-run spaces.

My studio work is rooted in printmaking and installation, but is ultimately interdisciplinary, moving between and combining media as needed for different projects. Relationships between architecture, public space and the body are my focus.

My work asks: How do we shape, and how are we shaped by, architecture and the built environment? How might a work of art subtly shift a viewer’s perception of their surroundings, both within and beyond the gallery?

What happens when we consider a building or a public space not as a standalone structure or site, but as part of a complex web of materials, timelines, and societal structures, that engages with numerous locations and lives beyond itself?

My sculptural work uses found materials – architectural fragments and commonplace building materials, in particular – and uses subtle shifts and interventions to allow them to move beyond their expected function. Prints push back against the format of a repeating multiple, instead creating sequences of varied, unique works that are shown in groupings. Installations engage a particular space, and the body of a viewer.

I’m more interested in asking questions than providing fixed answers, allowing the potential for politics and poetry to exist in the same space.

I previously lived in Glasgow, Scotland, which was (and continues to be) hugely influential to me as a city and creative community, and was really the incubator for my interest in architecture. I used to lead architecture tours in the city and around the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, now sadly destroyed by fire and uncertainty awaiting restoration and rebuilding.

In recent work I’ve been tracing architectural materials – brick, stone, glass, steel, concrete, slate – back to their geological origins. Among other things, this web of relationships highlights a set of conflicting time scales. It’s so difficult to conceive of geological time in relation to the duration and materiality of a human body. Where would we place ‘architectural time’ on this scale? It’s much closer to bodily time, generally speaking, and yet we tend to look to the built environment as something solid, a framework around which our lives are hung. I’m interested in the unraveling of systems that seem to be fixed and immovable, and what happens when those start to fray around the edges.

At a more straightforward level, my work asks viewers to bring their own associations and perceptions to the experience of a work. I’d situate the work at the intersection of art and architecture – though I’m definitely not an architect myself.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The opportunity to be in dialogue with, learn from, and collaborate with others is one of the most rewarding things for me. That ranges from fellow artists, to my students, to audiences and others outside of the field of visual art. There’s always something to learn, some aspect of what you’re doing or what they’re doing, or what you might develop or discuss together, that couldn’t have come into being on its own.

I’m particularly interested in collaborations across disciplines: for example ‘Toolbox,’ an exchange project I was invited to participate in by the Seldoms, a Chicago-based dance company. Through the exchange of ideas and strategies across our respective practices, sharing work with one another each day over the course of a residency in Scotland, we began to develop a ‘sourcebook for creatives’ – a set of tools and strategies, prompts for creation, that could be applied to different disciplines to generate new ideas and approaches. 

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

The first answer here is obviously financial. That applies both within and outside of the art world. Some artists are able to build a sustainable income through sales, but the majority can’t – particularly those whose work doesn’t lend itself to such models, who actively and critically resist the commercial gallery model, and/or whose work is shown in institutions that don’t offer fair compensation for creative labor. ‘Exposure’ doesn’t pay the bills.

Robust grant programs, fair project fees, and other sources of income are crucial to support and make valuable creative projects possible. W.A.G.E. (Working Artists for the Greater Economy) have been working since 2008 to establish sustainable working relationships between artists and institutions, and to provide a level of accountability in an industry that often has very little. They provide a certification model through which institutions (large and small) commit to an equitable model for artist compensation. In short, in their own words, “W.A.G.E. demands payment for making the world more interesting.”

Beyond that, and for individuals: Show up – to exhibitions, to talks, to events. Speak to artists. Ask about the work – don’t feel intimidated, or afraid to ask ’stupid questions.’ Buy art that interests you, if you can. The art world can be a bubble, and often the absolute best thing for an artist is the opportunity to discuss your work with people who are coming at it from a different perspective.

I’ve been lucky to live and work in two cities with especially artist-driven communities and DIY spaces, Glasgow and Chicago. So I can say from experience that it’s also critical that artists support and show up for each other – the most exciting things can happen in a community setting.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.franceslightbound.com/
• Instagram: @franbound

Image Credits
Images by Bob.mov, Joshua Patterson, & artist.