Networks

Sharon: Yes I particularly like, and identify in my own work, the bit where you talk about failed utopias. I have also been thinking about and looking at images of the way the built environment is so vulnerable to climate change (storms, hurricanes, to much/too little rain etc) and to war – images of Syria, Kiev etc where building are bombed out.

I am also drawn to buildings etc as they are in a state of construction and as the decay to become ruins. There is a skeletal quality to your work too which I think suggests that fragility/ half made quality too.

Laura: Ah yes, absolutely! I’m really interesting in ‘in-betweenness’ – the in-between states of materials, buildings, structures, objects, and in-between spaces too, like corridors, alleys, door frames, stairwells. Anything that has a sense of fleeting, and temporality. Like I love scaffolding in that sense – that these structures go up and come down constantly, and just wrap around whatever space they’re installed.

I love that you see the skeletal quality of my work too. I’ve been thinking a lot about how reducing down, and stretching out, and woking with lines that are organic/inorganic.

Both Sharon and Laura see the grid as something to disrupt – a form of making and re-making – challenging the stable (and not so stable) systems that surround us.
Sharon’s work is influenced by architectural features leading to her exploration of the grid, which she re-forms using different materials, often thinking about how the body can be placed within these gridded forms. Using fabric to create grids that then become slumped and twisted, she subverts these solid structures into semi-collapsing configurations.
Similarly, Laura’s practice systematically breaks down old items of clothing, which she re-forms into solid structures, using grids as a way to reference the warp and the weft of the weave that underpins the construction of these garments. Using clothing as a material from which to build with – a material that carries with it cyclical histories of land, labour, consumer and waste – her practice is ground in the traditions of craft and textiles, and pushes back against an automated, digitised world and hierarchies of labour and material; instead placing value in slow, low-tech processes performed by her own body.
The way we interact with built environments is important to both artists; both working in site-responsive and site-specific ways, carefully considering how to interrupt the flow of the body within these settings. Sharon dissects and fragments buildings and places, often thinking about how materials and urban sites can be easily broken down and re-built, and Laura often picks apart imagery of the gridded rebar used to build concrete structures, and how these become mangled when they’re torn down: both considering failed utopian ideologies and the traces of what’s left behind

JAN ’23

Visit to Gallery DODO in Brighton to plan for an exhibition later in the year with curator Jon. Current exhibition ‘Niagara Falls Projects:Return’ looks great in the space and is full of paintings and drawings that reflect and play on the uneven geometry of tiles, brickwork and surfaces.

The character of the gallery, previously a toilet block, is particularly appealing. It has traces of its previous function and has the transitory feeling of a room in the process of transformation. The combination of cinder blocks, new plaster, patchy cement, plaster-filled gaps  and ceramic tiles provides a raw and elemental space to work with.