Francesca Lally

MFA Printmaking, 2025

My artwork centers time as a material and collaborator. Through a documentary and archival based practice rooted in photography, film, performance, and print, I create work that explores systems and technologies of language, collective memory, violence, and love. I approach materials and their histories with curiosity and humor, probing at the borders of documents, edges, and discards across extreme physical and temporal scales. Using underexplored and queer image making technologies, hacking proto-cinematic tools, and toying with experimental archaeology, I am able to reflect and respond to the contradictions of history. By taking fragments of my own life to assemble and reassemble stories, I weave together new structures to create a dialogue across time. Informed by my background as a media archivist and teacher, my research centers the organization and scatter of information; investigating the poetry of what has been lost and gained through translation and abstraction. Through my work, I hope to expose and double expose (re)imagined narratives of collective power and liberated futures beyond the capitalist present.