Francesca Gagni

Fine Art - BA (Hons)

The ceiling of my home village church in Italy is covered with frescos that I admired as a young child, which inspired my interest in the arts. I completed a diploma in Fashion Design in Italy and emigrated to the UK thereafter. I currently live in Cambridgeshire. I taught drawing and painting for several years prior enrolling on the BA Fine Art course at Anglia Ruskin University.

During my time studying at Cambridge School of Art, I have explored a variety of post-modern and contemporary artists, that have inspired and influenced my work: Carlo Scarpa, Onya McCausland, Kwon Young-Woo.

My practice is multidisciplinary, including digital drawing, and digital manipulation, paper making, printmaking and embossing. I explore methods and processes employed in paper making and ink making, using sustainable and local resources. My current art practice is therefore craft-based, and the process of developing ideas is guided by the intertwining of materials and empirical experimentation.

My work evolves around the synthesis of manmade structures succumbing to transformation by entropic action. The paper artifacts manifest dualities of degradation and regeneration, formal arrangement and de-construction, within an ambiguous temporal dimension. Wabi Sabi principles are intrinsic in my work, which explore concepts of time and transience, the cosmic order manifesting in the decay and metamorphosis of the materials, and in the natural variables.