Is it a flower? a bomb? a tree? a machine?
These are trick questions because the works are of course drawings and sometimes objects. The real questions behind these trick questions are: What does it stand for? Why was it made? and Is this allowed?
To be fair, I have in fact drawn (inspiration from) flowers, bombs, trees, and machines, alongside war maps, weather maps, informational leaflets, and postwar abstraction. But the drawings do not represent, one-to-one, what they reference. My interest is in whether the formal similarities between such disparate things and their associated symbolisms suggest some sort of underlying conceptual alignment. Blooming outward and upward, sharp and roiling, the form in question constitutes an expansion that is both vital (like a flower in the cement that strives towards the sun) and cruel (like imperial ambitions which kill in the name of growth).
The real real question is: where do we go in a world whose metaphors fumble, slip, and falter, converge and diverge, forget, forge aimless paths, double back, overlap, reject history only to stumble back into it…?
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Unfolding through a riotous choreography of marks, Amelia Frank’s fine, directional drawings seem to drift between growth and magnetic field. Delicate and crisp, they vibrate with a quiet energy as thin arrows fan outwards, converging and dispersing as if tracing invisible currents or growth. Each drawing simultaneously feels like a scientific study and a gestural exploration. Points pull and repel each other, creating clusters that bloom from the page like the slow unfurling of a seedling.
Installed in an equally rhythmic sequence, the works form somewhat of a continuum of motion, each sheet a snapshot of an ongoing flowering. They suggest both microcosm and macrocosm: pollen dispersal, the opening of a flower, but also the invisible logic of magnetism or a scattering of radiation. Hinting at the idea of a flip book, Frank’s works on paper further take on the aura of movement they depict.
In the other room a large sculptural bloom echoes these movements in three dimensions. Its metallic petals twist outward with the same energy that animates the drawings. Forged from cold steel yet somewhat fluid, the work feels both mechanical and organic - a vessel for the same invisible force that ripples through the paper works. Materially, Frank utilises Trinitite/Atomsite glass from the Trinity nuclear test site, further alluding to the idea of this bloom as both constructive and destructive, organic and man-made.
Together, the sculpture and works on paper form an ecology of emergence. Frank’s mark making moves between two and three dimensions to occupy the intersection of the organic and the mechanical. These constellations of graphite and metal hum with the energy of things both blooming and breaking, carrying echoes of war maps and weather systems, of nature striving and empire expanding. Each piece feels like a study in direction, force and the instability of meaning itself.
– Chilli Gallery, 2025
2025