Dr Frances-Ann Norton is an interdisciplinary creative, working across tempera painting, textiles, ceramics, poetry and folk fiddle.
Dr Frances-Ann Norton received a BA Hons in Design from the University of Staffordshire. She holds an MA in ceramics from Cardiff Metropolitan University. She has completed a PhD on the pedagogy of critical thinking in art schools, from the University of Sunderland. She is module leader of MA Creative Practice at Leeds Arts University and a researcher in the School of Postgraduate Studies. She was trained as a potter at a Bauhaus-founded art school in the UK. She worked in the early 1990s in Charlotte, NC, for five years under a local master potter. While on this sojourn she discovered American arts and crafts. Fell in love with quilts, their history and geometric quilt block patterns.
She is an artist who loves to traverse disciplinary borderlands. Her identity is based on her geographical, social and historical locators. These things make her who she is – a cis-gendered woman born in the 1960s in a Northern European country, to designer-maker-teacher-musician parents from Irish and Yorkshire/Nordic heritage. She is a musician, a poet, an educator-researcher, a mother, a wife, and a Franciscan, which all meet up in who she is and is yet to become. The materials and processes of her paintings are integral to the finished piece; the 24-crt gold leaf and mineral pigments such as lapis lazuli used on the images are woven with memories of materials her parents used to create artisan jewellery in their kitchen workshop. Her mother the Modernist jeweller Ann O’Donnell, (1933-2019) would use gold and lapis among other precious materials in her home studio.
The process of Norton’s painting is based on Byzantine-era icon techniques and is steeped in a deep spirituality. The process of tempera painting requires one to slow down, focus, and be present in the moment. Her work explores the intersection of contemporary craft with traditional Byzantine-style painting. She aims to encourage the viewer into a spiritual meditation through following labyrinthine patterning. Paintings offer a hypnogogic, experiential journey for the viewer by becoming immersed in patterns.
