A Discussion Between Artist Laura Porter And Student Pollyanna Hughes

Can you tell us a little bit about the motivations behind your practice? 

Vessel comes from a broader exploration into textile pulp I've been working with for the last few years. I still think of it as something I'm exploring, but I'm interested in using recycled clothing as a raw material, how I can change the properties and create objects that are loaded with the histories of clothing manufacturing, the bodies that wear clothes, and some of the problematic or complex natures of the clothing industry and textiles waste. So, this textile pulp is a material that I can work with in a sculptural way, in a formal sculptural practice, but it's also an exploration into sustainability and creating this cyclical material that I can reuse. 

Can you tell us a bit more about this specific body of work at Mirror, about the central narrative of the vessel and how this installation is different from previous exhibits?

For Vessel, I was interested in diving deeper into our relationship with clothing, our bodies and spaces. Thinking about the ways that energies might be transferred through different materials, almost like a consciousness type of energy rather than a kinetic, thermal, or more formal energies that you might learn about in science. 

A lot of the sculptures in Vessel come from drawings that I've been creating based on either muscle forms or roots when you're propagating plants and you watch the roots growing different weave patterns. Anything that is activated in some way, growing, moving, and absorbing quietly in the background. Many of the forms come from different muscles that I've been drawing, from old biology and scientific books whilst especially thinking about ideas around labour. Like the labour of making, but also how that relates to the labour of producing outside of the art context. 

The work is quite labour intensive, so I guess in a way there's a hidden performative element to the work. I'm interested in the sort of processes that I put my own body through in order to create the work. For example, cutting up and grinding up the textiles, that very slow, drawn out process that is actually quite tough on the body once it's repeated again and again. I use this muscular motif as a way to explore repetitive actions with our own bodies.

Do you ever document this stage, through film or photography? And how long does this preparation take before construction begins? 

I find it really hard to document my process in a lot of ways because it is very long, and I don't really have the skill set to document on that sort of scale. I also get very obsessive with the making process, especially if I'm working towards a show and I've got an end goal. I can really embed myself in it and get stuck in this process of grinding up the fabric and using my body as a machine. So when it comes to documenting, I'm pretty rubbish at it, but for this show, I have actually put together a video with my sister who's a moving image artist. It was quite nice to collaborate with her and document the different stages of my practice, and looking back on it has been quite reflective as well. But I don't typically document it, I think the outcomes have hidden indications of the process and I quite like that. But, it's been interesting to create the film, and document it this time around.

Do you know how long it takes to prepare everything?

Probably a disgusting amount of time and I will spend a lot of time in the studio. I suppose for this show, it's been nearly 12 months in the making, definitely 10 months. And the longest part of that is just the cutting up of the textiles and creating the materials. I wouldn't even like to think how many hours I spent on it because it'd be a lot.

In terms of this new work for Mirror, I’m interested in how the architecture of the space influenced the scale and development of these pieces. 

It's always really exciting as an artist to have a blank canvas to work with, but it can also be a bit daunting, especially because I think my work has quite a strong relationship with architecture. I really wanted there to be these invisible links between the work and, as sculpture naturally has anyway, there is a strong relationship to all of the surfaces that it touches. 

I like to think about how much buildings and bodies in themselves have these invisible systems going on that we don't really understand or we don't have any control over or see, and I wanted to replicate that in this space. I utilised the sculptures going from floor to wall, into the pillar, for them to look like they have connections, even if those connections aren't physically there. Hopefully it all links in its own little ecosystem. It’s been really fun to think about how you can create links between all of the different surfaces, especially within this space and its pillars.

You balance the solidity of steel with the softness of recycled textiles. What inspired this specific pairing?

For a lot of the work here, I have started to expose the steel, which is something that's very new. I was using steel as armatures for their robust qualities, and completely engulfed them in the textiles. But I've been trying to see what the relationship is between the two materials when they're both exposed. I really like how clothing and steel have their own inherent properties that I then try to reverse in my practice. I take these formal steel lengths, make them wobbly and organic. And then I take clothing, which is very flexible and malleable, and turn it into a solid object through that process of making a pulp that dries and becomes solid. I like how they start to mimic each other. 

I'm really interested in the language of materials and whenever I'm working with these, I'm always thinking about as artists, what do we work against and push against? And what do we keep as the intrinsic nature of that material?

It's always fun, like with the textiles, all the colours are just the colours of the garments that I get given, I don't dye them in any way. And the way that I create the textile pulp is with organic natural based materials, so they don't change the surface texture too much, even though they do become solid. They retain some of that textile quality, unlike glues and plastic based additives that would turn them into something that is so far removed from their original material. It's always this push and pull of characteristics of the different materials and how I get that balance, and how I get the tensions between them, because I really love work that contradicts itself.

With the recycled component, my practice has landed at a place now where everything is pretty cyclical. I will sometimes use new steel that I've brought in for a big project, but the textiles, I can just re-hydrate and reapply to new materials. I'll often take all the textile pulp off of the armatures, soak it and reapply it to other things. Likewise with the steel, I can just re-bend and re-weld it, so everything is always morphing into another thing, another object.

It's nice how it sometimes carries with it some of those old histories. But it's important to me that I'm not creating any waste and that's become quite a big part of the process. 

There's this sense that these works are organic or breathing, is that a conscious balancing of biological and the human-made? Or the organic and the industrial?

Yes, that's a very conscious thing. And again, talking about that balance, I like to try and find a balance between something that feels formal and man-made and calculated, which is partly why I really love this grid format. I combine that with something that feels very loose and uncontrolled, like it is growing, I have a lot of the edges reaching out. And I like this idea that they look like they could just keep slowly growing over time and you could come back to the space, and even though it doesn't look like they're moving, they could have expanded out. 

It links back to this idea that I have around the post-human and this proposition that maybe our man-made materials and spaces and the things that have interacted with our bodies, like clothing, could go on to have its own consciousness or become organic in a sense and start to develop on its own, grow on its own. There's a lot of potential for our human debris that will be left on the planet once we're gone, so it's a fun thing to think about when I'm making the work. 

When you're starting a new piece, what comes first? The vision for the form or the sourcing and selecting of textiles?

At the beginning of a piece, the form comes first, but the two things will often be happening in parallel. When I'm in that headspace, I'll focus a lot of my energy on just grinding up fabrics so that I always have a big bank of it in my studio. That’s my procrastination process, the preparation of material. And then I'll make the forms out of the steel based on drawings and shapes and test things.

The metal work component of my practice is actually quite fun and playful and I get to try things out. When I've got a form that I'm happy with that feels somewhat complete, I'll start to cover it in the textiles. And that's when I'll work out what colours and what textiles will go where. I'm not very good with colour, so I like that control has partly been taken away from me. 

In my studio I cut and grind all my fabric up and put it into clear containers, stacking them so I can see ‘oh, I've got five containers of that one, two of that one, six of that one’. Then I can start to piece it together by looking at the colours through the Tupperware and placing them. I like to be working on both at the same time. 

Do you ever start with a small maquette?

No, I never make maquettes. In terms of scale, I always find it most comfortable, or easiest, working at a bodily size because then I feel like I can see how it resonates with my own body and how it would feel to be in the presence of it, walk around it, so I think I'd really struggle to downscale and make maquettes first. I don't think it would be as successful as when I'm working it with my own body and getting that sense of presence with the sculptures. 

I'm interested in knowing more about the selection of your source references and how they instigate your work. Do you have a specific selection for each sculpture or the body of work as a whole or is it less defined?

Do you mean like source material from?

Your images and the references you've talked about? 

Like probably most people now, I take a lot of photos and have this constant bank of imagery on my phone that I collect and that's always quite a nice go-to, especially when I'm trying to combine different forms. I really love, when you're walking and you see old rusted metal fencing that's been partly reclaimed by nature, trying to keep its original purpose or intention there, and it's drifting away. Anything that's been distorted by an unknown entity, I have a lot of photos of things like that. I've also been really enjoying working with these science journals recently and lots of organic forms, trees, branches, how they become entangled within one another.

And pipes in buildings, I really like to see how they shift and move and sometimes you get little insights into what's going on in them if you can hear them. Lots of buildings, buildings being built, buildings coming down, scaffolding, anything that feels like it's in flux or anything that feels like it's in this specific form. It's a moment in time where it was one thing and it will become another thing. And when you get that little glimpse into something that's going somewhere else, I like those moments.

I think you broadly covered this already but I'm going to ask you in case there was anything else you want to add; just beyond using recycled materials, how did your broader research into environmental ecology inform the work you create?

I think I'm always thinking about man-made systems that are put in place and the impact of that on our world. Researching about clothing specifically, some of the problematic natures within that are quite well known. I'm doing a residency actually later this year, where I'm going to be looking at textiles, pollution in waterways in Indonesia and trying to understand how that impacts different people's lives. But I don't like to go too explicitly one way or another. I'm really interested in the body as a thing to be protected and what that does when it's reduced down into this devalued form, and how this digitization of everything is making us disconnected from materials. 

I suppose we're so used to our everyday systems, life systems, being digitized and automated. I see that my practice is a bit of an anti that or a push back from that, where I get to just have this really bizarre, intimate relationship with something and go about it almost in the wrong way. A lot of people say I should make the textile grinding part of my work digitized or automated electronically. And for me, it's the antithesis of that, and going back to this really slow, impractical way of making. Making is a political act in itself, I think. And being an artist is quite a political thing. I like to try and put my own body through these anti-modern ways of working and existing with materials to explore that.