DVAA Member since 2024
Francesca Valsania
Website: francescavalsania.squarespace.com
About:
Francesca Valsania is a mixed media artist with a focus in Cyanotype, Sculpture and Furniture Design. Currently in her senior year at Bennington College, she is an Architecture Studio assistant and has apprenticed with installation artists’ Steven and William Ladd on beaded textiles and fabric scroll landscapes. She is working on her senior project creating cyanotypes that reference frescos from The Villa of The Mysteries.
Artist Statement:
I love working with mixed media including cyanotype, drawn to the dream-like scenes it evokes, wood, metal, plaster and fabric. I try to integrate classical and contemporary imagery, and the exploration of the human condition in relation to the environment in my artist practice. Towards the end of last year I worked with methods of cyanotype printing and created a series of collages that incorporated images of classical sculpture based on my favorite myths. Another love is sand and shells, their sculptural qualities, how the currents toss them around and shapes are washed away but traces are left. For one project, I formed the bust of a woman in the sand near the shoreline and photographed it at different times of the day and tide. I collaged over three pictures with colored glass, gold leaf and watercolor, to make a version of The Three Graces.
I have a sweet tooth, cakes and candy inform my work. A fan of Wayne Thiebaud and Claes Oldenburg’s Floor Cake, I began to construct painted paper models of desserts (cream puffs, macarons, red velvet cake, chocolate ganache) attracted by the architectural structure, layers of artifice, colors, shapes, materiality of the crafting process and meticulous attention to detail required. I made a small bright purple-and-yellow wooden table and glued cakes on it at awkward angles, and a bench shaped like an éclair. A goal is to ultimately create a line of children’s furniture based on sweets.
I’m also fascinated by contemporary design or techniques that integrate traditional or classical elements/imagery, the satirizing of historical ideologies, and bringing them into modern contexts. I am captivated by how artists from the Italian postwar Arte Povera Movement drew from the past in unconventional ways and challenged hierarchies of material and artistic value—with sculptures like Venus of the Rags or Mimesis.
