Dr Fran Norton’s research explores the evolving possibilities of Drawing within academic, cultural and social contexts.  As arguably the most dynamic, open and fluid of art practices, drawing can shift, record, learn, reflect and alter itself as a haptic mode of investigation. For Norton, the materials of such drawing enquiry include print, photography, installation, film, stitch, dialogue, objects, animation and the textual archives of mobile phones. Shaped via processes of collecting, documenting, sorting and re-presenting, the resultant drawings attempt to articulate the socio-political spaces and interrelations that define contemporary living experiences. 

 

Wide-ranging professional experience within creative industries leading to further study of Fine Art and Design culminated in a PhD that mapped the changing nature of ‘home’ in the context of globalisation and unprecedented human mobility. Since then, specialism in autoethnographic, feminist and museological methodologies has underpinned a cross-disciplinary teaching practice through which the expanded field of contemporary drawing fundamentally connecting fine art, illustration and drawing education is developed.