membership / artist member

Laura White

http://www.laura-white.co.uk
download cv here

Exploring the language of sculpture Laura White uses a range of materials from everyday objects to constructed matter. She is interested in our relationship and negotiation with the ‘stuff’ of the world, from the readymade to the handmade, image to objects, the representational to the abstract, playing with value, profile, association and meaning of individual and collections of objects. These objects/arrangements occupy a fluid space, on one hand demanding critical discourse, and on the other its own ambiguous, intuitive logic.

Laura has an ongoing fascination into the objects she comes across everyday in her life, from those found in bricolage and craft shops to the objects in and on the periphery of living and working spaces, such as an arrangement of objects in a charity shop window or ornaments clustered on a table. Her interest into these objects is investigative and anthropological, and yet also one of aesthetic judgement and taste.

Thinking about the objects one acquires, borrows and gives away during ones lives, Laura is interested in ideas and questions around their relational placement and display, where an object can be just as much a decoration, ornament or centrepiece as it is an artwork. The objects she makes from everyday and ready available materials, such as tinfoil, clay and expanding foam appear on one hand familiar, but equally strange and anomalous like prototypes or hybrids. We are encouraged to question our own taste and the value we give to these objects, pointing us right back out into the world where the strangeness is not so much in Laura’s artworks but the objects we come across everyday in our lives, and our judgement of them.

Laura gathers, makes, places, arranges, manipulates, distorts and re-presented objects and stuff to create new relationships and meanings. Sometimes things are left untouched while other stuff is highly manipulated or crafted from scratch, such as bags of purchased popcorn juxtaposed with hand-modelled clay pots. The constant accumulation of objects and stuff bought from high street shops and the Internet is part of the process of making her work and is reflected back in the finished pieces, often as collections. The visible process of construction to realize these works challenges the neutrality of the gallery, encouraging the viewer to negotiate the collision of objects and materials, making links and narratives between them.

Objects may suggest a meaning in one location/position, and then something vey different in another within a single work or installation. For example, a wooden pole is a spear, or leaver or lifting device, through slight shifts in appearance and placement. Contradiction and confusion is key in Laura’s work making deflections and complications within a unitary meaning to challenge and questioning our relationship and associations with the stuff of the world, whether that be those displayed in shops, homes, museums or left stranded on the pavement.

http://www.gold.ac.uk/art/research/staff/lw/01/

http://www.re-title.com/artists/Laura-White.asp