Dr Fran Norton

Dr Fran Norton is a practising artist with extensive professional experience of working in creative industries including photography, animation, film and the music business. These roles are connected by a multifarious Drawing practice and wide-ranging technical expertise. She uses photography, text, installation, film, archiving, stitch, burning, sound, printing, technology, objects, casting and multiple embodied processes, to draw.

Fran's practice-based research embraces an extraordinarily expansive view of what Drawing is and can be. Her PhD was entitled The Home I Carry With Me: Utilising drawing practice to map the changing spatial concepts of home in the context of unprecedented human migration.

Through collecting, documenting and re-presenting everyday dialogue such as that archived on mobile phones, she attempts to articulate the socio-political spaces, concepts and interrelations shaping today’s living experiences.

Fran has extensive knowledge of the key debates, discourses and philosophies underpinning Fine Art and its pedagogy, with specific depth in contemporary Drawing. She uses her expert knowledge of the conceptual, digital, spatial, feminist, temporal and museological, to aid this specialism in addressing its disciplinary boundaries and connectivities, as it continues to evolve and explore its own possibilities within broader academic and cultural contexts.

Recent dissemination includes: Drawing Strength (Exhibition, Melbourne, Australia); Tydningen, (Academic Journal, Södertörn, Sweden); Narrating Home in the Visual Arts through and East West Divide (Conference, Stockholm, Sweden); Recipe Book (Publication, UK); and Drawing on Dorset Book (Publication, UK).