MARFA — RULE Gallery is delighted to present Only Clouds Have No Edges by Frances Lightbound. This solo exhibition includes printmaking, sculpture, works on paper and site-specific installations, marking the artist’s first collaboration with the gallery. The exhibition opens with a public reception on Saturday, August 17, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and will be on view until November 16, 2024. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Frances Lightbound’s work poses questions about the materiality of architecture, exploring relationships between public and private space and associations between bodies, built spaces, language and landforms. Working between two- and three-dimensional media, she creates site-
responsive pieces that invoke the subjectivity of bodily and spatial experience, fraying the edges of seemingly fixed systems of organization and meaning.
Using architectural fragments and commonplace building materials in unexpected ways, she pushes these elements beyond their usual functions. Sculptural work engages the space it is encountered in and encourages reconsideration of the familiar. Reconfiguring everyday materials and visual motifs such as brick, glass, tile and window frames, her work invites audiences to bring their own associations to these fragments and to pause to consider them anew.
Lightbound approaches printmaking as a spatial and time-based medium, using the grid as a starting point. She often works in variable editions — building site-responsive installations based on the architecture of the space, rather than fixed or formulaic — the works are unfixed and always in progress. These prints challenge the tradition of identical repetition by creating unique sequences shown in groupings, where an image may be repeated in varying orientations, allowing the composition to expand in all directions.
Recent heavyweight rubbings and hand embossings stray between two, three, and four dimensionality. Using graphite sticks, she creates sculptural monotypes, engaging and investigating a site or surface through sustained tactile engagement. This process builds up a heavy mineral deposit, making an indexical impression infused with the particularities, inclinations, and energies of her subjective body at a specific moment in time. By repositioning her materials and objects, she unsettles assumptions about where they are typically encountered. The exhibition title, Only Clouds Have No Edges, serves as both a literal and
metaphorical counterpoint to the hard surfaces and rigid structures that are frequently referenced in her work.
Frances Lightbound (born 1989, Sheffield, England) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, where she is a lecturer in print media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the John David Mooney Foundation (Chicago), Paris, London, Hong Kong Gallery (Chicago), Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio), Snehta (Athens, Greece), MONACO (St. Louis), and 68projects (Berlin). She was awarded a Luminarts Visual Arts Fellowship in 2017. She has participated in residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, The Studio Pavilion (Glasgow), and Chicago Artists’ Coalition HATCH Projects. Lightbound received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016) and her BA (Hons) in painting and printmaking from Glasgow School of Art (2012).
For more information, visit http://www.rulegallery.com/