Exhibition: Compost

Working with discarded clothing – a material that carries with it cyclical histories of land, worker, consumer and waste – Laura breaks down the garments to create a raw material that is re-formed into solid structures, which are often a response to the environments in which she works. 

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Intrinsically grounded in the traditions of craft and textiles art, Laura’s practice pushes back against an automated, digitised world and hierarchies of labour and material, instead placing value in slow, low-tech processes performed by the body. Using her own body as a site of action and a renewable energy source, she undertakes labour-intensive tasks in order to critique the idea of productivity as a measurable output of effectiveness.   

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In a world where the longevity of human existence as we know it is becoming less certain, the clothing acts as a proxy for the body, and the sculptures become a confrontation, disrupting space; highlighting temporality and fleeting encounters, which underpin the need for new systems driven by our ecological environments and evolving lived/material experiences. 

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​Laura’s practice explores the in-betweenness of repurposed materials and built environments, and the energies of consciousness that have been absorbed by these over time. From invisible matter to formal structures, she’s interested in how the man-made can evolve and shift into a quasi-living entity; a reflection of the natural world on which it relies. She re-imagines our material world as neither rigid nor organic - straddling the space between biological and human-made; rural and urban; lived and inactive. 

‘Compost’ is a collection of new 3D works that disrupts the space as much as it pieces it together, threading elements from the outside, inside and the temporal into these transformed material objects. Accompanying the installation is a collection of wall-based sculptures and drawings that explore the slowness and contemplative act of configuring and building. 

Laura Porter is based between North Devon and South London, having studied BA in Fine Art at Middlesex University and an MA in Sculpture at Camberwell (University of the Arts London). Laura has exhibited extensively across the UK, and has been shortlisted for the Broomhill National Sculpture Prize, the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Award and the Collyer Bristow Graduate Award. She has been commissioned to make work for Left Bank Leeds, Arts & Culture Exeter and The Plough Arts Centre, and has received funding from the British Council as part of their Connections Through Culture Programme, with Malaysia-based artist Lee Mok Yee.