Francisca Prieto - Unbound

Francisca Prieto

We are delighted to invite you to Francisca Prieto’s first solo exhibition of works at jaggedart.

This ongoing series Between Folds brings together many of Francisca’s passions. The series explores the deconstruction of rare illustrated periodicals and books using modular structures and typographical elements. The pages of these beautiful books are released from their bindings and are restructured into artworks.

Each leaf from the book is folded using origami techniques, into a single modular structure. These are joined up with each structure adjacent to the next in a grid format. Francisca provides the unique experience of being able to look at a book and all of its pages at once, yet unable to read any one page individually. A hidden narrative emerges in each work through the connections that Francisca makes both in terms of the folded structures she creates, and the conceptual connections of the images and text selected.

It is in the careful structuring of each of these modules that Francisca’s attention to detail becomes apparent. From a distance, the overall tones of each structure are arranged so that the sum of these structures reveals a letter or typographic symbol embedded within the topology of the work. Close to the pieces, each leaf from the book is folded in such a way that the prevalent image, be it of a chair, or a bird, or a musical score, is central to each individually folded page. Carefully conceived and arranged, Francisca creates new visual stories from old books.

In Between Folds / Blue Catalogue the sign for one ‘shilling’ emerges from the intense cobalt blue page. She has refabricated a rare copy of Crowden & Keeves, Ltd. Brush and Hardware Manufacturers and Merchants Catalog from 1935. Furniture and hardware, distinct to its era emerge from each individual structure. Francisca has a talent for exploring and using the past to render alluring style and utterly contemporary artworks.

In the diptych Between Folds / Natural History, volumes I and II of a very early guide to general zoology evolves into a vast array of over three hundred coloured engravings, which seem randomly distributed, but accurately follow the order on the book.

Between Folds / Ordres D'architecture is created and framed with Fibonacci numbers, and engravings from Charles Normand’s celebrated work Parallel of The Orders of Architecture. It depicts different elements of a column in the distinct types of Classical Orders, which are subtly revealed.

Francisca’s interests and subject matter span poetry, literature, music, history, ornithology and the natural world, employed with the skill of an artist, mathematician and typographer. It is rare to see such precision married to such fluidity in an artwork.

Francisca was born in Chile 1974 where she trained and worked as a graphic designer. In 2001 she moved to London to study for an MA at Central Saint Martins. Since graduating in 2003 she has set up her studio in central London. Her work collected by private clients and featured in major public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Tate Gallery and British Library.