Laura Porter, ‘Folded Within’

Laura Porter is based between North Devon and South London, and is the founding director and curator of Studio KIND CIC, an artist-led space in Barnstaple. Having obtained a BA in fine art from Middlesex University and an MA in sculpture from Camberwell (UAL) Laura has received funding from The British Council, Arts Council England, A-n and has exhibited across the country. 

Intrinsically grounded in the traditions of craft and textiles, and the histories of fibre art activism, 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 these labour-intensive tasks in order to critique ideas around productivity, women’s work, and the experiences of female bodies in man-made spaces.

Working with discarded clothing – a material that carries with it cyclical histories of land, worker, consumer and waste – Laura breaks down the fibres to create a textiles pulp that is re-formed into solid structures. The labour-intensive process pays homage both to the bodies that made the garments, and the bodies that wore the clothing, whilst also creating a cyclical, renewable art material that can be re-hydrated and re-applied infinitely. 

The sculptures become a proposition for a post-human world, where a new material language is formed from their previous bodily interactions. The sculptures re-imagine our material world as neither rigid nor organic - straddling the space between biological and artificial; rural and urban; lived and inactive. Exploring the in-betweenness of repurposed materials and built environments, Laura imagines consciousness as an energy that is absorbed by these over time, and hints at a new life form; one evolving from man-made materials into a quasi-living entity.