Artwork Information

This collection of old hockey sticks, with their connotations of a previous era’s sporting glory, are presented like museum relics: the trophies or tools of a lost hunter-gatherer society. Francis Upritchard gathers these mundane objects from rummage sales and second-hand shops and reanimates them. With

their comical toothy grins and beady eyes, they seem to be occupied by malevolent spirits. Upritchard’s works are highly attuned to the politics of cultural display. Her stagey fauxtribal objects shrewdly critique how we relate to our cultural

inheritance, how the living negotiate with the dead. The title for the work is a reference to a French song, ‘Crocodile Smiles and Jealous Saboteurs’.