There’s something paradoxical about painter Francesca Lowe’s approach to still life, in that there’s nothing static about hers. 

Her latest series of paintings, due to be shown at Soho gallery Riflemaker later this year, are an optical strata of William Morris style wallpaper designs, Op Art, acid-tab imagery  and magnified dot matrix print, which were born out of a desire to ‘put life into stillness, to make things full and visually oscillate’. A painting may be single-surfaced by nature, but ‘I wanted to make things move, even though they’re flat’, Lowe explains.

‘I wanted the different motifs to come back and forward’, she continues, ‘so it becomes like a total illusion – the still life moves into the background’. One of the suggestions Lowe offers for wanting the ‘different layers of flatness [in her work to] move back and forth’, is that ‘I’ve got one eye that’s short sighted and one eye that’s long sighted’. She can quite literally see a kind of visual ‘push-pull, push-pull’, as she later describes it, where ‘the negative space becomes the front of the image’, allowing each layer draw the eye in different directions. ‘The idea of an image breathing and having its own life is really important I think’. Indeed, consider the popular four-frame gif of a London tube entering (or is it leaving?) a tunnel – would it have gone viral if it wasn’t possible to change the direction of the train simply by altering your focus? There’s a great power in giving a viewer more than meets the eye, and that’s something Lowe has fully harnessed with her art. Just don’t go getting a headache with all that flexing of your irises, particularly when looking at the spiky tessellation and clouds of colour in one new piece, which Lowe tells us was ‘inspired by migraine – those auras and flashing things’.  

Colour too has a kind of kinetic energy in Lowe’s work. Saccharine shades of bright turquoise and candy pink are chosen ‘because of the vibrations’ she sees in the contrast of ‘the acidness of the colours’ alongside ‘the calmness of blue’. 

Lowe’s work hasn’t always been such an exercise in atmosphere, however. Of her previous, more figurative, collections, she notes that ‘things within them were prescribed – it wasn’t just an outline, so if there was a face, it was a face’. That’s not to say that her pieces weren’t laced with creative presentation, the series Headland coming to mind particularly, where metaphorical images are seen escaping out of the subject’s cranium like a kind of medusa of consciousness. Still, ‘things within them were prescribed – if you see an eagle, you know it to mean peace and Kingdom’, she reflects. ‘It became my own little world, so it was very difficult for other people to get into them’.  

For Lowe, offering work that has life outside of the artist is vital. ‘There has to be room for things to be interpreted, which is totally dependent on the viewer’, she says. ‘It becomes the vessel of whoever sees it, and they can put on it whatever they think’. It was seemingly a three month residence in Kunming, China, that sowed the seeds for Lowe’s work to grow in this abstract way. Of the art culture in this home to eerie stone forests and apocalyptic red earth, she noted that ‘the skill is immense, and that rough-around-the-edges aesthetic that you have here just doesn’t exist’. Although she was fascinated by, and had huge admiration for the fact that ‘everything [in China] is clean, well-made, big and shiny’ however, it emphasised her love of ‘that slightly more humble, sketchy, layered thing’. 

Less about prescribed form or pre-ordained narrative then, Lowe aims to create paintings ‘that would change according to your mood’. She wants her pieces to ‘slip in and out of your space and my space’. Those Felix the Cat acid references intertwined in her most recent optical illusions, as recognisable to a viewer from their appearance on LSD tabs as they are from the children’s cartoon, are apt, it seems. Ultimately, Lowe just wants to ‘make a space for the viewer’s mind to roam around in’.