Laura Porter

Laura Porter is a sculptor and curator based between South London and North Devon, having completed an MA in sculpture from UAL. She has been the recipient of funding from the British Council as part of their Connections Through Culture programme, A-n, and Arts Council England, as well as being commissioned to make work by The Plough Arts Centre, Left Bank Leeds and Arts & Culture Exeter. Laura is also the founding director of Studio KIND. CIC artist-led space in North Devon.

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, her 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, Laura undertakes labour-intensive tasks in order to critique the idea of productivity as a measurable output of effectiveness. 

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.