"Untitled" at Francis Gallery captures the collaborative works of JAMESPLUMB and Garcé & Dimofski—objects suspended between voices, disciplines, and spaces, blurring the boundaries between self and surroundings.
Time is both a sculptor and an eraser—this is the silent undercurrent of the works by James Russell & Hannah Plumb, as well as Clio Dimofski & Olivier Garcé. Their pieces don’t simply exist in space; they bear the weight of history, revealing the delicate interplay between presence and absence, construction and decay.
JAMESPLUMB’s Stone (Weathered) series captures time’s slow, unseen artistry. At first glance, these compositions might recall Malevich or Morandi—subtle, restrained, yet deeply evocative. But instead of paint, the medium here is stone, shaped not by brushstrokes but by exposure, memory, and light. Sourced from a Bath stone yard, these remnants of Georgian architecture have spent years stacked, weathering in place. The imprints left behind—soft, pale patches where the sun has kissed, darker sections hardened by pollution and rain—turn the stone into an unwitting record of its past. A faint dividing line emerges between these surfaces, a spectral trace of time’s layering, sometimes blurred like a distant horizon, sometimes stark as an ancient petroglyph.
Meanwhile, the work of Garcé & Dimofski approaches similar themes through clay and glaze. Their thin, curved forms hang in quiet clusters on the wall, their shadows deepening the voids they create. Surface is everything here—metallic pigments, unpredictable in the kiln, shift from red to blue, from polished brass to oxidized rust. The result feels like a relic, something aged and elemental, echoing corroded film stock or oil shimmering on water.
But where JAMESPLUMB works with material already marked by time, Garcé & Dimofski introduce controlled chance—allowing fire, mineral, and reaction to shape the final outcome. Their pieces carry a tension between fragility and weight, between what is intentional and what is discovered. Their pedestals, with their sloping, architectural forms, appear as if hewn from the landscape itself, their deep hues undulating with movement, interrupted by sharp, geometric edges.
Francis Gallery, established by Rosa Park in 2018, exists as both a canvas and a stage for over 35 international artists, presented across the intimate backdrops of Bath, UK, and Los Angeles, US. What began as an unintended venture—born from Rosa's global explorations as co-founder of CEREAL magazine—soon bloomed into something far more profound. While documenting stories of museums and galleries, her engagement with artists and their spaces stirred something deeper, a connection to the art world that was not merely professional, but personal.
It was this serendipitous immersion that led her to test the waters with a pop-up group exhibition in London, a quiet yet resounding success. This moment of affirmation gave birth to the first brick-and-mortar gallery in Bath, where time and momentum gradually encouraged the opening of a second outpost in Los Angeles in 2021, as Rosa herself relocated westward. In her curatorial practice, Rosa relies not on rigid strategies, but on a subtle, intuitive sense of what resonates. There is no formula—only a deep, felt connection between her and the art. Each space she nurtures, whether in Bath or West Hollywood, carries its own distinct identity, a unique energy that reflects not just the location, but the pulse of its cultural surroundings. While overlap naturally occurs between the two locations, each gallery maintains its own quiet language, speaking in the lexicon of its environment, each telling a story in its own way.
