KEY POINTS:
Francis Upritchard would like me to write that when I arrived at her studio in Dalston, Hackney, she was swathed in furs and drinking champagne.
That sounds like a good introduction, so we go on embroidering. We also decide to say that she has spent the $50,000 of
the Walters prize money she won last year on crack cocaine. That she has called her agent that morning because her hair was in a terrible mess, had a tantrum and demanded that somebody be sent over to sort it out.
Which is the way some very successful, serious artists might carry on. She is 30 and a very serious and successful artist, and has a dealer, Andrea Rosen, in the States who she works with "but doesn't represent me". The difference - "Well, if you're represented by someone they'll look after your entire career. Like, 'I can't tie my shoelaces this morning' and they'll send someone round to do it for you." Hence the hair tantrum story.
I don't know why she doesn't have somebody like that, it would be lovely. Like having an art butler? "Sort of, yeah. Some artists really need a lot of help, some don't. I'm much more independent."
We had some fun making up our intro, which is all rot, alas. She will later send me an email saying she hopes she hadn't been "too edgy and solemn".
She wasn't, although she can be very serious and her art is certainly edgy. She is most serious about her career. "I don't want to be a five-year [wonder], like a superstar. I want to be someone who can work when I'm an old lady."
There are three of her works in the Saatchi collection which ought to be a very good thing but "he would have bought more but Kate's [MacGarry, her London dealer] has put a ban on now. I guess it was great to be bought by him when I was just starting out here but now it doesn't really matter too much." Heavens, I say, how hoity toity she's got. "It's not that," she says, "it's because some young artists, he's bought all their work, then flooded the market and ruined their career."
It is a difficult thing, this managing of an art career, and being successful too young can feel more like a blight than a blessing. As soon as Upritchard left art school in Christchurch she went to Auckland and worked with the Ivan Anthony Gallery. "And that was like, 'Oh, that's a bit easy, isn't it?' I guess I wanted a bit of a struggle."
So she moved to London, living in a building with rats and draughts and a bucket for a bath. She's hardy, she says. She doesn't mind rats and bucket washes - all that good old Kiwi camping when she was a kid, she reckons. Although she makes some money every now and then - quite big wads of money - it might have to last months so she is very cautious and sensible. "I'm not very expensive to run. I don't like fancy clothes, well, I do like fancy clothes but mostly I've got work clothes." She's wearing an ex-boyfriend's trainers she's had for five years.
She has bought an ex-council house in Hackney but she lives in her boyfriend's, also in Hackney. He is Hari Kunzru, the novelist who will forever be known as the bloke who got the £1.25 million ($3.37 million) for his first novel. "But authors are like artists and he hasn't published a book for three years so ... " Their house is full of the "granny stuff" she likes and art leaning against walls because they are always arguing about where to hang it. "Bits" of the house are posh; "It aspires to be posh but doesn't quite get there." I wondered whether Kunzru was a bit posh too but she says, no, no, he isn't. "He's half Indian and went to Oxford or Cambridge or whatever." Or whatever! "I can't remember. I don't even know which one's which [it was Oxford] but that's because he's extremely brainy, I'm sure."
She and Kunzru don't talk about each other to the media because "the last thing you want to be is like some sort of celebrity couple. That would be awful." She says later that she finds interviews "weird, trying to watch what you say" but that she hadn't done this very well because otherwise she wouldn't have talked about the boyfriend at all. Perhaps she is less wary of a journalist from New Zealand.
She is certainly wary of anything that might fuel that often fleeting celebrity which can exist in the London art scene. "You don't want to be a sensationalist artist. For some people, like Damien Hurst and Tracey Emin, that has been helpful but that was their generation's thing. I think my generation is a lot more quiet and just want to get on with their work."
Her studio is full of odd things: a box with pig's and human teeth, some of which are a gift from a friend who had them pulled; plastic "Wedgwood" bowls; a pair of stuffed albino snakeskins. She can't fail to appear completely normal by contrast, sitting at the studio table drinking tea from pretty, old china and nibbling Duchy Originals biscuits. She's very hard-working and practical. When she was younger she says she was "very, very sincere and I think that makes you quite weird".
She is attracted to weird things, obviously, which might be why she has a peculiar spelling of her name. Her real name is Gemma which she never liked, "too nice and girly for me". She changed it for a New Year's Eve joke, after a lousy year when a "lovely, hippy friend who was a numerologist" told her that names are very important. "I kind of liked the joke, the modern day magic of numerology. I don't believe in it but I think it's funny." She didn't expect the Francis to stick - and didn't realise until it had that she'd spelled it the masculine way.
She sounds English to me, but not to the English, she says. She has been in London for nine years and is trying, though not hard enough, to stop being so sarcastic. "Sarcasm is a terrible thing, I think, and New Zealanders use it far too much."
She couldn't resist the made-up intro though. New Zealanders, we agreed, will immediately pick it as being made-up (and sarcastic) and the English won't. I wondered whether you can tell from her work that she grew up in New Zealand. "I think so. Lots of my work still deals with landscape and it's quite gothic and it's quite humorous and I think gothic and humorous is something New Zealand work deals with a lot."
She has made twitching mummies with burial treasures of a pack of fags and teapots; a sloth with gloves and gold and silver rings; fake shrunken heads with real teeth. I read a mad profile of her in which she claimed her brother was paid $20 to dispose of the family cat. He hit it over the head with a shovel and she stuffed it. This is a New Zealand story. "It's a tall story so there are elements of the truth and elements of ... other things."
I'd also read that she had been "attacked" by animal rights activists. This is a story she doesn't like talking about. "I wasn't attacked ... and oh, it's so boring this stuff. I'm so over it. At the time it was annoying but in some ways it's the best press I've ever had because it's hilarious because it's just so stupid." But what actually happened? "Nothing, really nothing. They [the activists] just answered some journalist's questions."
They obviously didn't know she was a Greenie. "I know! That's the thing. That's what was so funny about it. I do worry about these things and I'd never buy new fur because I think the fur trade's bad. You know, I only buy free-range chickens. I'm one of those people."
She gets around Hackney on her bike, grows veges in allotments, didn't come home to pick up her Walters prize, at least in part, because "I'm conscious of the environmental impact of flying back. I do like to go back regularly so I don't want to go back for a night." She is quite sincere.
She emails to say that she has had an anxious dream which she thinks indicates "some sort of interview paranoia bubbling up!" She'd already told me that pieces about her "don't feel that different from a review. It's more of a personal review perhaps, but it is a review."
I suppose a bad review might read that she came across as"edgy and solemn" as she worried. She needn't have. Even without the made-up bits, and despite the sincere ones, she's at least as interesting as her work.
