Rooms of gloom and doom

Artist Francis Upritchard with some of the figures in her Artspace exhibition. Picture / Kenny Rodger

In the main room of Artspace a desiccated sloth lies, arms stretched rigid towards the ceiling. It is the work of London-based New Zealand sculptor Francis Upritchard, who at 28 has carved out a place in the next generation of British artists with her displaced fetish objects.

So is this a nod to fellow expatriate Ronnie van Hout, whose recent work has featured life-sized apes?

"No. Ronnie's apes are Ronnie. This is nothing. This is hollowed out, all spirit and life is gone. To me this is, rather than a stuffed animal, more like a costume," says Upritchard.

Around the corner Upritchard displays a range of old and new smaller works in glass museum cabinets, the lighting coming from a set of pottery lamps.

"I want it to be a really gloomy, doomy show. This is like a corridor in an old museum, where the rest of the exhibits have been cleared out."

Upritchard works by transforming worn out items, cast out junk which has already had some other life, into new objects. They are not readymades like the Marcel Duchamp urinal, which got its power from a common object being declared an art object.

Back home in Christchurch, Upritchard rescued a trove of old hockey sticks from a Christchurch dump shop and turned them into crocodile heads which now line the gallery walls. Plastic fake Wedgewood bowls and containers have been given new lids sculpted with small portrait heads of her brother, her boyfriend and herself.

Another set of pottery heads adorn garish German ceramic vases. In the velvet-lined cases where protractor sets once nested are pseudo-Maori artefacts.

"I like to talk about collected objects in museums, where the real thing is no longer present once you wrench it from New Zealand," says Upritchard.

"There are museums in London where there are drawers of the most beautiful tiki, and the real object does not exist any more because it is all what you invest in it.

"That is what I am trying to do with the sticks and the stupid crocodiles. I am trying to invest something in these things by taking them out of context."

Upritchard grew up in Christchurch, discovering in the fifth form through teacher Nancy Bracey that she could draw. "Suddenly the messiness of my handwriting wasn't a problem." She went on to Canterbury University's Ilam art school, moving to England after she graduated. She was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures Prize in 2003.

"When I went to London, I realised I shouldn't be bothering with a lot of the stuff I was doing, because people had worked it out already.

"I need to go on and follow my own aesthetic."

That aesthetic, or look, was avoiding "proper" sculptural techniques and making things which looked "immediate, home made, fast, cheap, shonky and a bit scary".

She says some pieces don't make it out of the studio, if they don't feel right.

"It's not about whether they are good or bad. I can hate a piece passionately, but as long as it feels right I will leave it.

"There are works I didn't like at first which are now favourites.

"That is why I say it's none of my business, you can't really know yourself but you can tell a dud."

Rather than do post-graduate study at one of the London art schools, Upritchard opened the Bart Wells Institute with friend Luke Gottelier, a photographer and painter whose work, while not selling, was earning respect.

"We decided we did not want to run a gallery, but we would do it while it was still new and making good shows, so we invited curators we liked and knew would put the effort in."

The gallery showed emerging artists like Brian Griffiths, Harry Pye and Sam Basu, winning critical appreciation.

"That was instead of art school, that's how I got my peer group thing," Upritchard says.

The idea artists need to be part of a cohort is well entrenched in Britain, where the "Young British Artists" are now not so young and looking distinctly establishment.

"It is hard to make art on your own, and in New Zealand you are very much alone," she says. That doesn't stop her coming back every year for two or three months.

"My family is here, and I want to suck New Zealand back into me because I'm a colonial in England.

"My friends forget about that, but I need to stay different, I need to stay a visitor."

The title of the Artspace show is Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed.

"The world is a mess," explains Upritchard, whose summer reading was David Mitchell's dystopian Booker finalist Cloud Atlas, J.G. Ballard and Philip Larkin.

"I'm a very positive person even though I think we are all going to die in a nuclear war sooner rather than later. That's why I'm not having any babies," she says.

She is probably too busy. The year is filling up fast with travel and preparation for her first New York show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery.

Exhibition

* What: Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed, by Francis Upritchard

* Where and when: Artspace, 300 K Rd, Feb 9-Mar 5