Vessel

Grounded in domestic crafts and the histories of textiles and Fiber Art, Laura’s practice engages with its legacies of activism, exploring themes of resourcefulness, labour and material consciousness against the backdrop of the global clothing industry, the environmental crisis and the experiences of female bodies in man-made spaces.

In this exhibition, Laura thinks about objects, spaces and bodies as vessels - entities that carry and transfer energy - and considers consciousness as an energy form in its own right; something contained and released, something that’s shared, and spreads indefinitely. By breaking down the binaries of human/non-human and synthetic/organic the work becomes a proposition of a future landscape. Envisioning human-made materials as something with the potential to absorb the matter, energy and invisible substances that our bodies shed as we breathe, move and touch, the sculptural work proposes a new quasi-living form in a post-human world that has absorbed and learned from human and natural life-forms. 

The sculptural forms emerge from images gathered of layered muscles in illustrated biology journals, weave patterns from old craft books, the construction and demolition of buildings, meticulously extracted stitched seams from garments, mangled metal fencing being reclaimed by nature, and many more. Each bears a relationship to the boundaries and confines of our own bodies, which become animated by our own presence. 

The subtle acts of destruction within Laura’s practice considers how hand-craft became intertwined in violence, in which the body has been reduced to a devalued component within a production line, despite the continued reliance on hand-made processes in clothing manufacture. This metaphorical reduction is embodied by her slow, laborious method of breaking down discarded garments into a raw material for art-making, which she cuts and grinds into a textiles pulp. Laura sees this as a kind of performance; one that pays homage to the hands that made the clothes and the bodies who wore them, rejecting an automated, digitised world and hierarchies of labour and material - using her own body as a site of action, a renewable energy source and a tool for gentle production. 

The evolution of the garment manufacturing industry is rooted in women’s labour that originated from the home; from growing and breaking flax to make clothes for the family, to the first ready-made garments, the patterns of which were distributed to households for women to stitch, through to rapid growth and the move to factory-based production. This shift paved the way for the Industrial Revolution and the brutal and extreme conditions of production now synonymous with the fashion industry. Thinking about her own family’s heritage as cotton spinners from Northern England, Laura considers repetitious acts as a retracing of histories; a kind of inherited muscle memory. 

Laura Porter (b. 1991 Lewisham) is based between North Devon and South London, and is the founding director and curator of Studio KIND CIC, an artist-led space in Barnstaple, North Devon. Having obtained a BA in fine art from Middlesex University and an MA in sculpture from Camberwell (UAL) Laura has received funding from The British Council, A-n and has exhibited across the country and internationally.