a solo exhibition from Francesca Hummler
Private View: Thursday 1st August 2025 17:00 - 21:00
Opening Hours: Tuesday 29th July - Sunday 3rd August 2025 12:00 - 18:00
Location: Nunhead Cemetery Chapel
BOOKING IS NOT ESSENTIAL
This exhibition is part of the Summer series from the FLP x Friends of Nunhead Cemetery Exhibition Program 2025.
In collaboration with the Feminist Lecture Program, photographic artist Francesca Hummler is happy to present her solo show “Almost a Saint” at the Nunhead Cemetery Chapel from the 29th of July to the 3rd of August. A continuation of her ongoing series “Rituals,” this presentation considers the female form in relation to the conservative Christian doctrine with which the artist was raised in the United States. Self-portraiture has long been central to Francesca’s practice, here she explores through sculpture how the fracturing of her body in photographs has become a therapeutic gesture, a kind of spiritual reclamation through “shattering” the self.
Viewers are invited to rest on votive candles to enjoy the installation, which hints at the artist’s desire to be placed inside a reliquary, a tradition rooted in the Catholicism that her German father grew up with, in which the bodies of saints or sacred objects are displayed in glass cases for veneration. Francesca inserts herself into this lineage not to mimic holiness, but to question who gets to be revered. She turns toward this tradition as a way to escape the way her body has been consumed through the gaze of others. Longing for a mode of seeing rooted in reverence rather than desire, where vulnerability, nakedness, and stillness are offered for contemplation and care.
This echoes a time when the Church commissioned art that celebrated the nude body, as seen in Michelangelo’s muscular statues, Bernini’s rapturous saints, and countless other depictions of divine ecstasy and sensual spirituality. Where now does art make space for reverence, spirituality, and the body to co-exist? “Almost a Saint” honors a lineage of sacred sensuality that was broken in favor of the puritanical modesty, bland corporate-ism, and right wing rhetoric steeped in patriarchal control now shaping the aesthetics of American Protestantism. The artist reflects on how the trend of politized faith has fractured the relationship many Christians, especially women and queer people, have with sexuality, gender, and embodiment.
Her newest self-portrait, “For D.O.M. (Da Operam Mihi)” created specifically for this exhibition, joins the “Rituals” series, proposing that vulnerability and nakedness might be acts of spiritual resistance, not shame. In researching alternative theological traditions, Francesca has become drawn to Gnosticism and its belief in interior revelation, its insistence that divine connection can be forged through one’s own embodied experience. As Elaine Pagels writes on the early Gnostics in “The Gnostic Gospels”, “…like artists, they express their own insight - their own gnosis - by creating new myths, poems, rituals, ‘dialogues’ with Christ, revelations, and accounts of their visions.” This resonates with Francesca’s desire to reclaim ritual and art-making as legitimate forms of worship, crafting her own queer, feminist spiritual language to counteract the inherited suppression of the divine within each of us enforced by the church communities she was brought up in.
Supplementary Events
SHE WHOM MY SOUL LOVES: A QUEER CHURCH SERVICE
Thursday 1st August, 17:00 - 18:00
Join us for a special one-hour queer church service held ahead of the opening of “Almost a Saint”, a solo exhibition by Francesca Hummler. This participatory performance reimagines the structure of a traditional Methodist service through a queer, feminist lens, inviting all to reflect, rejoice, and reclaim.
Please note: this is not an ordained religious service, but an artistic interpretation and collective ritual. The service will include music, scripture, communal reflection, and candle lighting, drawing from the Methodist tradition while honoring the sacred intimacy of figures such as Perpetua and Felicity.
All are welcome, with special care extended to women, queer, and trans individuals seeking a safe, affirming space to explore faith and embodiment on their own terms.
Accessibility Notes
There are 3 small stone steps into the chapel and a ramp can be provided. The chapel is at the end of a gravel path and the stone floors can become slippery, especially in wet weather. This is an outdoor exhibition as there is no roof on the chapel, so please remember to bring weather appropriate apparel.
The nearest train station is Nunhead which does not have step free access. Buses 484, 78, P12 and 343 stop near the cemetery entrance.
About the Artist
Francesca Hummler (she/her b. 1997) is a German-American visual artist and researcher working with photography, based between London and San Diego. She holds a B.A. in Media Arts and a B.S. in Biochemistry from UC San Diego (2019), and earned a Master’s in Photography with distinction from the Royal College of Art in London (2022). Her dissertation, American Identity and Photographic Healing, reflects her interest in identity, familial intimacy, and generational trauma, shaped by her experience as the daughter of German immigrants in the U.S. Influenced by photo-therapy, she uses self-portraiture to explore selfhood and engages in collaborative therapeutic portraiture.
In 2021, she was a laureate of the Carte Blanche Étudiants award, exhibiting at Paris Photo. In 2022, she won the Young Talent Award from the Vonovia Award for Photography, with work shown at the Sprengel Museum. Her work is held by the Odunpazarı Modern Museum (Türkiye), featured in Photonews, and she was interviewed by Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She held solo exhibitions in Erlangen and London in 2023 and showed Das Kuckucksei in Artforum (Jan 2024). Her latest solo, Rituals & Reliquaries, was exhibited at the Crypt Gallery, London, in October 2024.
Website: https://francescahummler.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/fransangle/?hl=en