Frankie Roberts is an interdisciplinary artist born in Cambridge UK who graduated from Slade School of Art in 2018. Frankie's work draws on observed personal histories and narratives, using humour and hysteria to investigate the flippant mechanics of human emotional experience. 

Frankie would like to offer the congregation a series of verbal gut punches, a melange of faux-wisdom and insights into her own confused human core as a product of psychological overwhelm. She delivers the first sermon over an almost-soothing choral soundtrack, repeating the mantra Even Goodies and Baddies Have Mummies and Daddies; a physiological grounding that can seem the only thread connecting human bodies as they slip past one another, leading their own lives as they charade as uncurious beings. Her writing possesses many voices spoken from the same mouth, bringing into question what it is that really connects and repels us as beings; desire, hate, boredom, predictability. The other sermons are delivered over live looped sounds in the form of evensong services.

Eavesdropping is my biggest inspiration. I’ve worked in a homeless hostel for the last 5 years and then through my degree to support my studies, before this I trained to be a nurse and worked in an HIV/AIDS unit. There’s no veneer to conversations in either place; it’s bodily, raw, angry, naked, terrifying, hysterical; often bizarre. It demands an open mind and a sense of objectifying some of the things you’re confronted with. There’s little room for shallow or aesthetic concerns, no niceties, you’re dealing with all the stuff beneath that. Human cores. I think this is why I find the flippancy of everyday concerns quite humorous and fascinating, including my own. How easy it is to be sucked into the extravagant promises of a yoghurt advert or obsessively reading up someone’s star sign to see if you’ll be together forever. - Frankie Roberts

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