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She sits on a raw wooden stump at the end of a long white plinth. Weirdly thin-limbed, naked except for an odd cowled hat that flops over her eyes, and painted in colours that suggest an accident in a tie-dyeing vat, she raises one white arm and points a blue-and-yellow finger beyond the artwork she's part of. The gesture conveys absolute conviction in a horizon we can't see. Where is she pointing? If she is the 'leader', why does the rest of her crew pay no attention? Is she from 1973 or 73 BC? What's the hat about? And what is she doing at the helm of an exhibition by New Plymouth, New Zealand-born, London-based artist Francis Upritchard?...

Whatever the answer, this much is clear. In Upritchard's vision of the counter-cultural past, everything is subtly but decisively bent. Her approach is all there in miniature in her exhibition's title, where she takes the second half of 'rainbow' and turns it around. Where 'rainbow' has an ending that sounds open and expansive, 'wob' brings the word back to earth, with its echoes of blobs, gobbets, thingamabobs, and fainter echoes of 'wobble' and 'what'. As atmospheric phenomena that hover in the air after rain, rainbows made a perfect symbol of rejuvenation and spiritual aspiration in the art and culture of the 1960s and 1970s. But precisely because rainbows are atmospheric and immaterial, there's something oddly humiliating about all attempts to bring them to earth through representation...

Like their tree, the inhabitants of rainwob teeter between optimism and absurdity. Rolled and kneaded from a substance that looks a lot like home-made childhood play-dough but goes by the name Super Sculpey, they don't gather so much as mill about on the surface of an enormous white plinth. The first of their kind came into view in Upritchard's presentation of 'Plastic People' in 2007 in London, a show whose unlikely stars included the fruit-and-veg-coloured Amelia and another called Clan of Rob, apparently in homage to Upritchard's brother Robert. Tottering forward on comically inadequate legs with palms upturned and eyes blankly staring, Amelia appears to be drawing down some higher force and bringing it direct to us. With his pond-weed beard and lank hair-band, Clan of Rob suggests a guru gone to seed, his shaggy vitality long since given way to heavy-lidded introversion. Only after looking for a while does one register fully the bizarre elongation of his arms, a detail so subtly dislocating it feels like you too have briefly entered whatever psychotropic state he inhabits...


The fact they are so emphatically made is what makes Upritchard's tale of the recent past convincing. Where earlier works relied more on comic juxtapositions and deliberately gruesome or jokey distortions, the main news in Upritchard's recent shows has been the delicacy and subtle oddness of her modelling in soft substances like clay, leather and natural rubber. The soft pinch that creates a nose, the puttying of a too-thin arm, the almost dainty inadequacy of a hand or foot: these details tell us something about the individual characters, certainly, but more importantly they tell a story about their maker. Constantly in these works, Upritchard seems to be feeling around in her materials for faces and bodies she can only partly recall. There are constant hints and flashes of far older objects - limewood saints, time-smoothed Hittite bronzes, praying figures from Ur, medieval figures carved in bone. But no sooner do such connections rise into view than they subside again into the material, as if whatever precedent Upritchard was reaching for had just slipped from her fingers...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue.