Spotlight: Frances Cannon; Curated by: Florence Cools; Keeping time; Shelf: Charlotte Jansen; Piece together.
Melbourne artist Frances Cannon has been drawing for most of her life, but now her arresting illustrations may have found their most important moment ever. By Alice Birrell.
FROM TIME TO time, artist Frances Cannon would see her work walk by on the street. “Sometimes I’ll let it go, but sometimes I’ll say: ‘Oh, nice tattoo.’” A creator of large-scale paintings, she also commands a sizeable fan base with her small line drawings, which she shares on Instagram and subsequently often end up on people’s arms, legs and hands … with her permission.
“I love it that people connect so much with my work that they want to put it on them,” she says from Melbourne, two weeks into lockdown. “The first person, other than myself, who got my work tattooed is my best friend. So, it started off from a place of love and connection, and that has carried over to people I’ve never met before.” Though she can’t see them on the street right now, she keeps up with her community on Instagram and emails tattoo commissions.
It is this online community of more than 200K followers that keys into a new tone in the digital realm. While traditional influencer imagery can rankle right now, accounts like Cannon’s use visuals to share figures, lyrical text and colour to evince emotions. Her posts invoke gratitude, tears and relief that others are also feeling the full gamut of sentiment, as she’s worked through subject matter including last summer’s bushfires, mental illness, the effects of the pandemic and the LGBTQI experience.
Cannon doesn’t shy away from her politics, but uses wistful images to disarm, like protest statements scrawled inside fairy wings. “When you package difficult topics in a way that isn’t too hard to understand – and I think cute illustrations are the perfect way – that makes the message more accessible,” says Cannon, who goes on to explain that her style, honest with a deliberate naivety, flows best when she embraces spontaneity. “The thing that trips me up is thinking about people looking at my work,” she explains.
Those traces of a child’s eye view are reverberations of what she describes as a sometimes-lonely childhood, as her parents moved to Thailand for work. “It’s always been how I sort through what I’m experiencing. As a kid I would just hop off to my room and draw for hours and make up imaginary friends through my drawing.” She still thinks it’s crazy, “that I managed to make art my career”.
Since then, brands including Gucci have taken notice, inviting her to draw a piece for its Bloom Acqua Di Fiori fragrance launch in 2017. “I have no idea how they found me,” she remembers. “I just got a message in my Instagram inbox and I thought it was fake … but yeah, obviously it was real.”
With multiple exhibitions (the most recent tackled the representation of women in religion), plus radio and panel appearances, teaching and workshops under her belt, Cannon is now focusing on getting through lockdown and her drawings are tapping into an even greater need for community. With plans capsized, she is honing in on the essentials. “Connection and friends and family are so much more important than work,” she says. And that includes with her following. “I think knowing what it’s like to not have a community and then having a community now, even though it’s online, that’s so special. I think most art is about connection – the meeting point between the artist and viewer. When that works, it’s so comforting.”