Francesca Balzan

Francesca Balzan is an artist, art historian, and author. She studied privately under the renowned Maltese artist Harry Alden and later obtained a diploma in painting from the Malta School of Art. She is self-taught in sculpture. Balzan’s primary interest lies in portraiture and the human face and she uses historic sources to produce narratives that are whimsical and often humorous.
As an art historian, Balzan has specialised in researching and has published around the history of jewellery in Malta. She has served as the curator of the Palazzo Falson Historic House Museum and has curated several exhibitions, including those of historic objects as well as of contemporary art. Her 2021 solo exhibition, titled Impossible Conversations, at Studio87 in Valletta, featured sculptures of characters associated with the Valletta Ta’ Liesse area, primarily based on individuals she discovered in early 20th-century passport applications at the National Archives of Malta.
Francesca Balzan is fascinated by the concept of ruins and the fragment that comes to represent the whole. She likens this to the process of writing history, where historians find fragments in archives, piece them together, and fill in the gaps to present a cohesive image of the past. With the collection showing in CLAY / CRAFT / CONCEPT Balzan set out to do the opposite. Instead of sculpting heads, as has become expected of her, she aimed to explore how the body could also convey a significant amount of information about the individual it represents.
The viewer is invited to piece together these contemporary ruins and to imagine a conversation between the three individuals, even in the absence of their heads. The sculptures are hollow and resemble containers, suggesting that the head can be dispensed with in order to create something functional.