BL6STUDIOS BRING YOU

The best way to understand Franki Beddows is not through labels or exhibition history. It is by standing in front of the paintings and looking at them for longer than is comfortable. See what you notice: a face hidden in a mark, a figure you did not see at first, something humorous, something unpleasant, something familiar. That is where the work really starts.

There is something slightly unnerving about a painting that appears to know what it wants before the artist does. That is the territory Franki works in. She began painting in 2018, at a point when grief had already altered the shape of her life. The loss of her mum sat heavily with her, and painting became a way of working through what could not easily be said. At the same time, she was deeply affected by the return of Twin Peaks and by the strange, dreamlike world of David Lynch. Those two things – grief and the uncanny, found each other on the canvas.

Franki is self-taught, and her way of working is instinctive rather than academic. She paints in acrylics, using brushes, tools, her hands and fingers, building marks and textures until something starts to reveal itself.

She does not begin with a finished picture in mind. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. She starts with disorder: colour, scrapes, shapes, accidents and layers. Then she watches. Faces begin to appear, figures emerge, creatures seem to surface from somewhere inside the paint, and a scene or narrative may suddenly begin to make itself known.

Franki has described this process as a kind of emotional archaeology, something hidden being brought to the surface.

This is not simply gothic painting for the sake of shock, nor is it horror imagery dressed up for effect. The darkness in Franki’s work has a personal history.

Her favourite question while painting is wonderfully simple: “What will happen if I do this?” Sometimes, by her own admission, the answer is good. Sometimes it is not. But that is the point. The work comes from trial, error, play and exploration.

Franki’s work has also appeared beyond BL6. She was one of the artists included in The Artfulness Gallery’s 3 YEARS ON! group exhibition in 2024, and there is also a published reference to her providing internal illustrations for Phantasmagoria Magazine, Issue 16, a horror-focused publication from 2020.