Laura is a sculpture and installation artist. She is the director and curator of Studio KIND. in Braunton, a trustee of The Plough Arts Centre in Torrington and manages the Art Box for The Burton. Laura’s currently in the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Award, and her most recent project, Reciprocal Space Residency (in collaboration with Lee Mok Yee), was funded by the Connections Through Culture grants by the British Council.

"My practice addresses the way we interact with space and materials through a simultaneous absence and presence of the body, in order to understand personal responsibility versus collective encounters; imagining a world void of humankind, where our debris forms a new consciousness that grows and shifts like the natural world in which it exists.

The work deals with themes of development and decay, the dual presence of which forms a critique of productivity against the backdrop of growing, global eco-consciousness, and explores the body as a site of action; a renewable energy source.

By performing low-tech exercises with my own body, I push back against automated processes and re-imagine our value systems and material world as neither rigid nor organic; straddling the space between biological and human-made; rural and urban; lived and inactive.

Using multiplicity and repetitive processes, representative of mass production, in juxtaposition with hand-made and artisanal sensitivities, there is a continuous tension indicative of the dichotomy of the individual versus the group. These regularly repeating acts address the patterns and systems that regulate life, and the in-betweenness of space and body amongst natural and built environments.

I’m interested in the language of materials, and how we can manipulate and re-arrange these material properties to find an understanding and truth in objects. Taking clothing as a starting point - as an object that has had an intimate relationship with the body but has been removed and shifted into a new purpose - my practice systematically deconstructs and rebuilds materials to reflect these labour-intensive processes and production. The clothing acts as a proxy for the human form, underpinning the need for new systems driven by our ecological environments and evolving lived experiences."