Education

  • Conditions Studio Programme, 2021 - 2022
  • Goldsmiths University, 2018 - 2021, BA Fine Art
  • Kingston School of Art, 2017 - 2018, Art & Design Foundation

Residencies


Solo Exhibitions

  • Metroland Cultures, 2025 (upcoming)

Selected Group Exhibitions

  • SOS_23 WIP Exhibition, South London Gallery, 2023
  • Means, Bermondsey Project Space, 2023
  • 3D Women Platform, Art Hub, 2023
  • Doing Better With Worse, Ugly Duck Gallery, 2023
  • Conditions Show, Whitgift Centre, 2022
  • -topia, Bermondsey Project Space, 2022
  • I Know a Guy..., Art Hub, 2022
  • Deep Meaningful Conversation, Ugly Duck Gallery, 2022

Publications & Writing

  • Image Permission, edited with Christopher Bond, Exhibition text for Means at Bermondsey Project Space, 2023
  • A Particular Reality (APR): Developing a Nuanced Pedagogical Methodology within Practice-Based Higher Education Courses, co-authored with Michelle Williams Gamaker and APR, in De-/Anti-/Post-colonial Feminisms in Contemporary Art and Textile Crafts, edited by Katy Deepwell, 2023
  • Deep Meaningful Conversation, edited by Hugo Hagger and Babette Whiting, 2022

Workshops, Events & Projects

  • Young Archivists, Croydon Archives, 2024
  • Woven Together, St Saviours CE and St Paul with St Luke Primary Schools
  • Family Archive & Village Green talk, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2023
  • We regret to inform you!, 3D Women Platform, 2023
  • Another Art School is Possible, A Particular Reality, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023
  • Reimagining Crits, A Particular Reality, 2023
  • Rights in Focus Conference, Autograph, South London Gallery & UAL, 2023
  • Early Years Creativity Project, Bow Arts & Dagenham Nursery Consortium, 2023
  • Art School, Backwards, A Particular Reality & Kingston School of Art, 2023
  • Harsh Light, Bloc Projects, 2022
  • Souvenir/Collection/Archive, Goldsmiths CCA, 2022
  • Shifting the Margins, Goldsmiths Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre, 2022
  • What does an anti-racist classroom look like?, Thomas Tallis School, 2022
  • Mark Leckey invites Conditions, NTS Radio, 2021

Awards





Francesca Telling is an artist, facilitator and learning practitioner interested in how institutional and anti-institutional knowledge is produced between the archive, classroom, family and community. Rooted in archival research, her works aim to complicate hierarchies across forms of documentation – developing through understanding what is preserved or lost in the interpersonal making of diasporic histories. She collects objects, images and inherited memories, exploring how their re-emergence in photography, print, language and time-based media can make sense of fragmented records tied to people and place.

Francesca is often working with children and young people – through workshops and dialogues within and beyond the systems that disempower them. Responsive to local contexts and informed by anti-racist approaches, these collaborations hope to reimagine learning environments and their authority through emotional engagement with questions of empathy, togetherness, belonging and justice.

Recent work has been defined by youth-led investigations of local histories, utilising participatory photography, mapping processes and dialogue to make creative interventions into archive collections. Through engaging racially minoritised young people in conversations across time, these projects make collective discoveries about power and change at the sites of historical knowledge generation - activating the past in the imagining of more just futures.

Francesca is currently a studio resident at Metroland Cultures in Kilburn, Brent.