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Laura Porter is an artist and curator based between South London and North Devon. She graduated from Middlesex University with a BA in Fine Art and Camberwell, University of the Arts London, with an MA in Sculpture. She has received funding from The British Council, Arts Council England and A-n, and has exhibited across the country. Laura is also the founding director of Studio KIND CIC, a non-profit contemporary art space in Barnstaple (North Devon). This September, as well as presenting a body of new work in ‘Holding’ at Irving Gallery, Laura will be participating in the Pontianak Biennale on Borneo, Indonesia.
Intrinsically grounded in the traditions of craft and textiles art, Laura explores ideas around labour, the body and material consciousness, often using her own body as a site of action and a renewable energy source to perform low-tech, repetitive making and unmaking.
Working with discarded clothing – a material that carries with it cyclical histories of land, worker, consumer and waste – Laura has developed a new material in which to make art: breaking down garments by hand that are combined with organic substances to create a textiles pulp, often applied to steel framework.
Inspired by the man-made environments and materials around her, Laura re-imagines our material world as neither rigid nor organic - straddling the space between biological and human-made; rural and urban; lived and inactive.
The work presented in ‘Holding’ considers how our domestic spaces become activated by our bodies; what we absorb and shed as we move in and out of spaces, and the objects and materials that have an intimate relationship with our own bodies.
