Francine Kay Affourtit (1975) is a Pennsylvania based artist, educator and arts organizer. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Tyler School of Art as a Temple University Fellow.
Francine's studio work concentrates on re-thinking the applications of printmaking to create sculptural installations and unique constructions from woodcuts. Francine’s activities outside the studio are fueled by a desire to build relationships with artists, communities and the public as a means of collaborative creation and transformative discourse.
Recent projects include Eye of the Beholder in collaboration with Biennale Urbana in Venice, Italy and Traveling Suitcase Installation Project that embarked on a six-city exhibition tour, including exhibitions at GENERATORprojects in Dundee, Werkstadt in Berlin, and Corridor Gallery in Brooklyn. Francine's work has been included in exhibitions internationally including, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, International Print Center of New York, Castello 925 in Venice, Flatbed Press in Austin, and Temple Gallery in Rome. Francine is a 2017 recipient of the Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts.
Artist Statement
“I am the fragment sounding the dawn
You are the walls of my every echo.” Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
I engage with Print as a conceptual framework. My artistic practice tests and teases methodologies of printmaking as a means for developing structures where chance and control can dance in a rhythmic duet. Harnessing the serendipity inherent in the print process and the unique mark-making of wood, I seek to make work that is in collaboration with my medium.
By investigating the symbiotic relationship of paper and matrix, repetition and memory, form and break, the shifting planes of imagery and composition form both the technical scaffolding of the work and the aesthetic contemplation of trace, fold, profundity, edge and void.
As my community of collaborators grow and flourish, I find that the frame (matrix) has been pulling further and further out, allowing for more complex and infinite iterations. This evolution has developed from my personal, professional and artistic experiences, leading me towards engagement with objects and situations that allow for me to relinquish ownership and connect with space and publics as a necessary element for breathing life-force into the process of participating as an artist within my world community.