Networks

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