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LAURA PORTER

she/her | b. 1991, Lewisham | based in North Devon and South London

Laura Porter is based between North Devon and South London, and is the founding director and curator of artist-led space, Studio KIND. CIC, in Barnstaple, Devon.

Working with discarded clothing – a material that carries with it cyclical histories of land, worker, consumer and waste – I break down the garments to create a textiles pulp that is then applied to welded metal structures.

Exploring the in-betweenness of repurposed materials and built environments, and the energies of consciousness that have been absorbed by these over time, I’m interested in how the man-made can evolve and shift into a quasi-living entity; a reflection of the natural world from which is derives. 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 human-made; rural and urban; lived and inactive.

Intrinsically grounded in the traditions of craft and textiles art, my 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 my own body as a site of action and a renewable energy source, I undertake labour-intensive tasks in order to critique the idea of productivity as a measurable output of effectiveness.

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