Born in New Plymouth, New Zealand and based in London, Francis Upritchard creates sculptural installations featuring archetypal figures-the psychic, the African, the nincompoop-hovering in a state of uncertainty. Modeled in polymer clay, the curious figures are rendered in a slightly unnerving scale, not quite human but large enough to look you in the eye with their only partially opened eyes and blank stares. The skin is painted monochromatically or with distinct gridded patterns, the tones ranging from sickly yellow to mossy green to calming blue, as if from an otherworldly tribe. Yet their handmade and hand-dyed garb suggest they might be characters from a range of past eras, from medieval knights and jesters to meditating hippies in the 1960s. For a recent exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Upritchard experimented with both form and material, creating a group of dinosaurs out of papier-mâché or an earthy matter drawn from rubber trees in Brazil called balata and displaying them on simple yet elegant fold-out tables produced by the Italian company Olivetta on customized steel bases. For her Hammer Project, Upritchard will bring together the figures and the dinosaurs for the first time. Inhabiting the space like strange bedfellows from different times and places, the characters are not so much actors in a legible narrative or drama as they are complexly enigmatic, strangely absorbed in their own thoughts. Equally drawn to the history of figurative sculpture as to a wide range of craft and artisan traditions around the world-from ceramic techniques to glass blowing, enameling to welding-Upritchard pushes these practices in new directions, bringing them together to create a striking and original visual language of her own. This will be Upritchard’s first solo exhibition on the west coast.

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard is organized by Hammer curator Anne Ellegood.

Francis Upritchard was born in 1976 in New Plymouth, New Zealand, and graduated from Canterbury University of Fine Arts in New Zealand in 1998. She has recently had solo exhibitions at The Whitechapel and Kate McGarry, London (2014), The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin (2013), Anton Kern Gallery in New York (2013), Nottingham Contemporary (2012), and MIMOCA in Kagawa, Japan (2013) and Secession, Vienna (2011). Her only other solo museum exhibition in the United States, A Long Wait, took place in 2012 at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. In 2009, she represented New Zealand at the 53rd Venice Bienniale with her exhibition Save Yourself. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Freedom Farmers at the Auckland City Gallery in New Zealand (2013), Lilliput at the New York High Line (2012), Contact at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (2012), Bush Of Ghosts: Nathan Mabry, Djordie Ozbolt and Francis Upritchard at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles (2012), and many others. Upritchard currently lives and works in London.

Hammer Projects is a series of exhibitions focusing primarily on the work of emerging artists.

Hammer Projects is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, Hope Warschaw and John Law, and Maurice Marciano.

Additional support is provided by Good Works Foundation and Laura Donnelley, the Decade Fund, and the David Teiger Curatorial Travel Fund.