Toward the Unconscious: An Interview with Francesca Schwartz

Francesca Schwartz, After the Ball, 2024, 72 x 48 x 168 inches

By: MYLES FUCCI November 12th, 2025

Myles Fucci: Francesca, how did you get started? How did you move into the art world?   

Francesca Schwartz: The thing that happened is my mother died. When my mother died, I was quite bereft. I was walking through the park from my office on the Upper West Side, and I felt a lot of despair. I’m not a religious person, but as I was walking, I was begging for a sign. The only sign I saw was some squirrels eating nuts or something.  

Shortly after that, I had a friend from New Orleans who was an artist who decided to visit me & one night I wondered, "What  should I make?" Pork shoulder. So I went and got a pork shoulder. And then I got into a whole relationship with it. I was brining it in the sink, on the kitchen counter, even in the bathtub. Eventually, I decided to cook it.  

After it was done cooking, I took it out of the oven, and while I was holding it, I felt a little off balance. When I slipped, the meat and the bone separated, and the bone went flying across the  room. The next morning, when I was cleaning up, I saw the bone under the table. It was the ugliest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It horrified me. And then I said, “Oh! It's my mother.” That’s when I felt I had finally gotten a sign from her, and after that, I started working with bones.  

MF: In much of your practice, you use metaphors of the female body to explore themes of memory, longing, and loss. You’ve said, “In this meditation on the body and its interior and the world in which we are located, I encounter the space between longing and loss, memory and its erasure, permanence and dissipation.” How do you see your work responding to or holding  space for the broader collective experience for women everywhere, especially in the context of our current political state?  

FS: I think there’s something paradoxical about my relationship to this question. To best answer it, I have to quote Freud, my man. He said two things that feel especially relevant here. The first: With the introduction of the unconscious, I will disturb the peace of the world. And the second: The human psyche is universal and exquisitely singular.  

So when we speak about the corporeal self, the physical body, I speak about the female body because it’s the only body I know. Which is another way of saying it’s the mind and soul I know, and that my body inhabits space like no other, like no one else. But I suspect even more dramatically than a man does.  

I mean, for example, can you imagine birthing a creature? One day, your body starts extending outward, you feel these kicks and movements, and then, soon after, a living creature comes out of your vagina. I couldn’t imagine it, and I’ve done it twice! 

But going back to your question, that’s what the collective experience lends itself to within my work. It’s partly what the story around the female experience is about. It’s hieroglyphic, it’s unknowable, it’s interior. To be entirely honest, when people say my work is feminist, I get where they’re coming from, but I often say, feminist art is a conscious agenda and my work is not a conscious agenda. My work operates from the unconscious, which has no agenda.  

MF: I really do love the focus on materiality and it's centrality to your practice. You use a lot of dye, wood, found objects, etc., in your work, but I’m most fascinated by your use of bones. You mentioned in other interviews, as well as your website, how “bones mediate spaces between worlds, between birth and death, living and dead, material and spiritual, you and me”. Given all of this, how and why has bone become such a central element in your practice? Can you speak to the significance it holds and what drew you to it as a recurring material or symbol in your work?  

FS: I started working with these fantastic butchers from Harlem Shambles, which sadly no longer exists. We’d stay up late into the night selecting bones, and I’d take them home to begin purifying them. Over time, I saw that I had to become a butcher myself. I had felt too far removed from the animal, but through this work, I started to bridge that distance.  

As I spent more time with the bones, I began cutting into them, digging deeper, and somewhere along the way, they transformed themselves into sculptures. When I looked closely, I saw a hideous yellow interior, something that made me realize I had never really gotten to the root of the bone. So I dedicated a year to digging the marrow out.  

Bones occupy this in-between space we talked about earlier, between life and death. They're the part of the body that endures. And I say “endures” intentionally because sometimes, if you look at a bone after some time has passed, you’ll notice a small hole that wasn’t there before. Where did it come from? How did it form? It’s as if the bone is still alive in some quiet, mysterious way.  

To me, bones hold a kind of hieroglyphic meaning.  

MF: What do you mean by hieroglyphic?  

FS: I mean that when you look at a bone, you might see one thing, and I might see something entirely different. I feel deeply connected to them. They're a link to the dead. They remind me of a French phrase, après coup—you don’t fully understand something until it's already passed. Bones are like that. Their meaning unfolds over time.  

MF: Given your use of materials, do you feel that each new piece carries an archival quality, bringing fragments together to form a new entity? Or are you more interested in obscuring those references entirely, creating something that stands apart with a new and independent meaning?  

FS: It’s the same thing. When you ask, What is archival?, I think of the ocean the tide going in  and out. Every day, the tide shifts, and if you’re walking along the beach, you’ll never see the  same thing twice. My practice mirrors this. It’s shaped by movement, by rhythm, by the layering  of remnants. And if you consider the ocean more deeply, so many different forces affect how it behaves. You walk the beach after the tide recedes and find these scattered fragments, a sea debris of sorts. That’s what feels archival about my work. It’s like a lullaby that plays again and again but changes a little each time.  

For example, when I finished my work with bones and began experimenting with other materials, it led me to a new series called Inscription. It focused on how the body is  marked, how it becomes a canvas for trauma and assault.  

In that process, I started taking images either of my own work or things I encountered in the environment, and enlarging them significantly. I would layer them on a lightbox with other images, then print those composites on layers of chiffon. One night, I woke up and realized how this entire method was a reflection of my body’s own trauma: I was born without depth perception, without stereoscopic vision.  

I already understood that the world appeared flat to me, but I hadn’t realized how this limitation was showing up in my work. By superimposing images on the lightbox, I was unknowingly recreating the way my eyes project two slightly different perspectives to my brain. My brain occludes one of the images; it can’t fuse them correctly. Through this realization, I came to see how my work was revealing a deeper cognizance of my own body’s trauma. In this way, the work doesn’t obscure meaning, it carries it. It accumulates memory, perception, and physical history, becoming an archive of what’s felt rather than what’s simply seen.  

MF: As you continue to work within the larger themes of loss, despair, memory, and trauma, how do you see your practice evolving as time moves forward? And where do you think you’ll continue to draw inspiration from, or will the inspiration remain the same?  

FS: I think about the tide and the lullaby we spoke about earlier, but also about resurrection, suffering, and the female body. It’s like I can’t get away from these themes. No matter what I do in art, they appear. They surface again and again.  

Even though I play with different images and forms, I constantly ask myself: Where the hell do  these come from? Is there something new waiting? And yet, what I’m drawn to always feels  both old and new, that feeling of returning to something only to understand it differently, more deeply, in hindsight. I keep coming back to the same tide, the same tidal wave.  

I think of the future of my work in the same way I think about the unconscious. Artmaking is often framed as a linear process, but my work doesn’t follow a straight path. It moves like the unconscious, without a clear beginning or end. You don’t always know where to enter.  

The unconscious, to me, is like the bone of life. Artmaking becomes the tension, the tolerance, and the frustration, of trying to create something that may ultimately be impossible to  fully understand. That’s how I see my practice now, and that’s how I imagine it evolving in the future. So to your question, is it a return, or a call toward something new? I think it’s both.