FLORA PARROTT graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2009. Her work is about the representation of physical sensations. In works where printmaking, collage and sculpture converge, instinctively chosen images and objects are arranged in a way that articulates a physical experience – what happens when you breathe, the pressure of air, the fluidity of liquid in cavities, muscles relaxing and tensing. Such physical functions are diagrammatically dissected and suggested in 2D/3D works that explain what can’t be seen.
Flora Parrott likes to use materials that relate to the sensations she explores. “I aim to set up combinations of images and objects in such a way as to induce simultaneous feelings of calm, contentment, claustrophobia and anxiety.” In a work entitled Inhale/Exhale for instance, she combines an image of a black balloon, a piece of silk that is trapped behind glass and a large piece of sweet chestnut wood. Other works juxtapose gaffer tape, copper, bone and rubber. She is interested in the way that materials respond to one another and often uses elements that attract and repel. A key motif is making arrangements of objects and images that have a resonance, striving for an almost acoustic vibration.
A residency at the Ryedale Folk Museum in Yorkshire in March 2011 culminated in Dipole, an installation in the gallery that visually described the sensation of standing on the broad expanse of the Yorkshire Moors just outside the Museum. Parrott pegged out a patch of ground that exactly matched the dimensions of the gallery. She accumulated a mass of data from land surveys to folklore, 3D scanning to ley lines, and proceeded to create an art installation that "became a conductor of lost, endangered and living information" (Cherry Smyth).
Flora Parott's work was recently on show at the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery in Coventry in Trapezius, a joint show in which Parrott and Lisa Gunn explore the ways in which the human body repairs and heals itself. The artists responded to works in the Herbert Museum; Parrott has made sculptural configurations using coral, fossils, mineral ores and bones. Her solo show, Circuit: Five Deductions, was the inaugural exhibition at Tintype's new space in Sept/Oct 2011.
Parrott’s work has been selected for many group shows including Irregular Wasps at Tintype and Interstice at Testbed1. Flora Parrott teaches at Norwich School of Art and Ravensbourne.
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