Amanda Francis
Senior Lecturer
Fine Art
Department of Architecture & Visual Arts , School of Arts and Creative Industries
Amanda Francis is a senior lecturer and course leader for BA Fine Art.
OVERVIEW
I co-lead the BA Fine Art alongside the Photography BA course. I currently run Level 4, which I see as a vital stage in students’ development. For many, it’s the first time they’ve spent extended time with their own ideas, and my role is to help them build skills, confidence, and a critical framework to make the most of that opportunity.
While Level 4 is my main focus, I also teach across the course, and I value working with students as they grow into more independent and ambitious practitioners. Teaching for me is about encouraging students to explore, to test ideas, and to recognise that skills (whether technical or critical) are valuable tools not only for art-making but for life.
I am interested in how art objects can both question and reflect the cultural world we live in. For me, making is both an inquiry and a form of research, something felt through the hands, experienced visually, and deepened through conversation, reading, and writing. This interplay between practice and thought sustains me, and I believe it is something everyone can develop in their own way.
MOST RECENT RESEARCH
I trained as a sculptor, but my practice has always been experimental and shifts between forms. It has expanded into video, writing, cut-outs, works on paper, and sometimes installation. I enjoy learning new skills and trying different processes, and this sense of openness keeps things alive. Some artworks I’ve made are fragile and unstable, others are more solid or functional. I like the way these differences can hold tension and ideas.
Much of my work draws on personal history and the way memory and place shape how we see ourselves and the world around us. Nostalgia now runs through the work (that’s a newish thing), alongside questions of belonging – not always as something I have. These ideas are not fixed, and I value the way art can hold that uncertainty and flux.
Over the years, my practice has often felt like making a patchwork. Pieces coming together, then falling apart, and sometimes being stitched back again in new ways. That rhythm of making and remaking is part of the work itself. It’s never perfect, but that’s what keeps it alive and worth returning to.
Exhibitions include: Heterotopic-Disjuncture II Space Station 65, London, Meet Infinity R52L, Berlin, CUTS Matthiesen Gallery, London, 230 Steps between… INCON London, A Patchwork in Progress , Galerie Peyrusse , France, KnightCycle (solo show), number 82 London, What’s Going On? The collection Lincoln, Gyumri International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Armenia , The Scope Purcell Room, South Bank, London and When in Rome (UK Touring).
EXTERNAL ROLES
I am a long-standing member of Lewisham Arthouse, an artist-led cooperative based in a former Carnegie Library in South London. Over the years, I’ve taken on different roles within the organisation, and I now serve as a trustee. The Arthouse is run collectively by artists who work together to support each other, provide affordable studios, exhibitions, and community projects. I work alongside other artists to develop the organisation and help make it sustainable for the future.
TEACHING
Course leader
Publications
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