Francis Upritchard is a doctor of contemporary voodoo. Borrowing her aesthetic from the kinds of weird and wonderful mementos treasured in archives like the Pitt River Museum and the Wellcome Collection, Upritchard forges a dark and twisted history of her own. Haunting and perverse, The Travellers Collection is a curio cabinet: it’s shelves house the untold magic of grotesque clay pots, ’shrunken’ animal heads (snarling real teeth!), bizarre instruments which seem to be carved (from possibly human!) bones.
A make-shift funerary chamber for her little mummy (with an all-seeing real glass eye), containing all the treasures he will need to accompany him to the afterlife. Upritchard’s is an art of falsifying information. Appropriating readymade artefacts, hexing the viewer’s imagination to wilfully reinterpret: a car boot sale cookie jar as a mysterious ancient urn, tacky tourist shop paraphernalia as prize trophies from a long lost empire. Upritchard’s a magpie Indiana Jones: inventing creepies and curses from stuff that probably exists in your attic.