Maryclare Foá (aka R & F Mo / M.M. Kizi / MK Palomar) graduated from RCA in 1984 and was awarded the RCA drawing prize. Her practice (sometimes across disciplines) explores narratives that connect the seen the sensed and the dreamed. A member of the performance drawing collective: Foá, Grisewood, Hosea, McCall, she co authored Performance Drawing (Bloomsbury Sept 2020). Foá completed her PhD Sounding Out: Drawing in response to the outside environment at Camb 2011. Foa’s work has been exhibited in Oliver Projects curated group show titled ‘Almost Blue’ ( RWS gallery Whitcomb St 2024), the RA Summer show (21, 22, 23 & 24), A History of Drawing Camberwell Space (2018), is included in the V&A archive collection, and can be seen in Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris 2007) and Hyperdrawing (I.B. Tauris 2012). Foa is represented by Oliver Projects (Oliverprojectslondon.com).
Education
Turps Banana Offsite Course 2020-2021
Turps Banana Correspondence Course 2019-2020.
PhD (by practice) 2006-11
Sounding Out (Drawing in response to the outside environment) Camberwell (U.A.L.)
MFA 2002-04
Fine Art. Central St. Martin’s (U.A.L).
MA RCA 1981-84
Illustration. Royal College of Art London.
Dip A.D 1978-81
Graphic Arts. City and Guilds of London Art School.
Statement
Narrative is central to my work, it has threaded through my drawing and painting practice since the 1970’s. Beginning with location drawing; recording the story of place, moving on to painting personal mythology; embellishing a story of the self, later making performance drawing; actioning the self as a character in a live story, and sound drawing; revealing the material story of place.
My current practice (from 2016-) focuses on drawn narrative painting (concerning human behaviour, contradictions, interactions, ambiguity, and place), in which I work to conjure a remembered or imaged scene, while aiming to bridge the processes of drawing and painting. Grappling to keep the work alive, I retain the initial marks and forms made in the building process, sometimes drawing in paint, other times painting layers into and over drawing, in this way the processes become one, woven together into the whole.
However, the word Pentimento; often used to describe paintings in which traces of previous forms can be seen, comes from the Italian word for repentance. I do not regret altering or reshaping during the process of making, I celebrate this flux and flow of changed decisions , the traces that record those moments during the journey taken, and the evidence those marks leave of different points of view existing in the same space. So; I choose to describe the process I take, of drawing, painting, dabbing, brushing, changing, smearing, scratching, altering, marking, wiping, digging; a pareidolian archeology, mining form in abstract spaces.
A pareidolian archeology reveals visual triggers, unfixing my ideas and conjuring unexpected narrative. This allows memory and imagination to come into play and avoids my holding to a fixed image in my mind’s eye. Rather than the triggers being serendipitous happenstance, I think I see them because I recognize something familiar, they are already (to a certain extent) on my mind.
The triggers and the behaviour of the material offer me directives, as do multi layered narratives perpetually flowing through media and real life, these and my subconscious are all part of the process, I’m finding my way in the moment of making, this helps to keep the content and the painting alive.
R&F Mo / M. Foá London 2022