Françoise LeClerc is a sculptor working in ceramics, as well as found objects and photographs. Often depicting horses, her work evokes themes of emergence and transformation, sensitivity and trust, and time passing.
“I have worked with horses as a figurative subject for several years now, says LeClerc. “Their transcendent energy will always be compelling, but the more I sit with them, the more they make me think about the passage of time: both in the sense of collective memory and the pace at which we move through our lives.” LeClerc is interested in how our relationship with the horse has reflected our relationship to speed, ‘productivity,’ and our separation from nature. “We were so connected to this species for millennia – dependent on their strength to grow our food, fight our wars, travel and transport,” she notes, “and within a generation or two they were, effectively, gone.”
LeClerc’s horses are noble, iconic. “Even though most people today have little or no interaction with horses, I can’t help but notice the emotional impression they make on us when we see them now,” she notes. In this body of work, the artist is looking at that tipping point, right at the turn of the 20th century when cars drove horses into obsolescence, but also released them from what were often lives of extreme neglect or hardship. “I’m intrigued by that moment when humans started moving faster, with less effort, but at the ultimate expense of our planet, and perhaps, our own sanity.”
The child of immigrants from Taiwan and France, LeClerc was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the rise of Silicon Valley. Perhaps ironically, she is fascinated with the past. Her work examines personal histories that are simultaneously familiar and foreign, intimate and imagined; stories that ground us, and are yet just out of reach.
After graduating summa cum laude from UCLA, LeClerc began her career in the motion picture literary department of CAA, the entertainment industry’s foremost talent agency, where she represented screenwriters, novelists, journalists and directors. When her mother had a stroke, she returned to the Bay Area, where she transitioned to historic home restoration, and eventually found her way to sculpture.
She lives on a two-acre farm in Sonoma County where she raises sheep, chickens, flowers and fruit.