Francesca Mollett

The Aidan Threlfall Award enabled me to visit holy wells and pagan springs in Penwith, an area of Cornwall, and explore how attitudes to water by regional communities have been manifested in the landscape in order to think with water as I do with painting. The cave, indentation, or hollows in the ground found in Cornish landscapes resonate with an interior bodily experience, and the structure of my paintings.

The timing of the Award created the possibility to collect imagery, journey and research at a moment when I needed to replenish after the RCA online degree show. The bursary opened up a way of developing my practice; I am keen to continue to create such self-led trips and explorations in the future as it was so generative. It also helped me realise shared concerns I have with Land Art, even though I use a different medium. I have made a large number of paintings that directly relate to imagery found at the wells, and the way the layers build and build, shows a continual adjustment of memory or a looping back of experience into painting. The paintings have formed part of exhibitions with galleries in LA, Henley and Milan.