Artists

LAURA OLDFIELD FORD

Artist statement.

Laura Oldfield Ford's work takes the form of a psychogeographic investigation, a process of subjectively mapping the city in its intensive state of movement and flux. Central to her practice are her walks around cities. Through these drifts, and the documentation of them, she seeks the point of transition from aesthetic practice to a radical critique of the city.

Her drawings combine seemingly disparate elements in a process akin to montage; they sprawl like urban conurbations and become a landscape of the imagination, documenting rapid obsessions, curiosities and desires. Ford regards her work as diaristic, suggesting the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting.

Currently Ford is looking at areas of London subjected to massive rebranding and development such as Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar which is under imminent threat of demolition and also the Aylesbury estate in Elephant and Castle where she lived from 2000 to 2001. Ford makes work that both imagines a future London when the new regeneration schemes have been implemented (and ultimately failed) whilst simultaneously sifting through the detritus of history.  She weaves in narratives and personal histories, not just her own but others occupying the same territory past, present, future and examines London through different lenses.

There are certain historical moments Ford returns to in her work where constellations of social upheaval flared up and illuminated Britain's cities, most notably July 1981. She subsequently engages in a process of 'chorographically' mapping the country along the lines of social antagonism. Many areas have been subjected to urban renewal schemes as a direct result of social unrest with Toxteth and the subsequent Liverpool garden festival being an obvious example. This forms part of a much broader area of research but also informs her work on urban regeneration and the efforts made to 'design out dissent'.

Ford is interested in the way a registered shift in drawing or writing can allow her to occupy numerous temporal and spatial zones simultaneously. Most recently she has been making large scale billboard installations and flyposters to make direct interventions in contested zones. She makes references throughout the work to the crashes and recessions of recent decades whilst projecting into an uncertain and sometimes dystopian future.

The need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city has become increasingly urgent in the past decade as the process of enclosure and privatisation gained momentum. Ford's drawings, in one sense allow for a chronicling of a disappearing London, being acutely aware of the city as a site of transience and rapid redevelopment. Semiotic ghosts haunt the desolate landscapes depicted here in ballpoint pen, fluorescent spray paint and acrylic.

Since 2005 Ford has produced a zine titled 'Savage Messiah'. The zine uses a strong DIY punk aesthetic, where Ford returns to the late 1970s and early 1980s at a point of cultural unravelling. The England conjured up in her work is one of socio-political upheaval, the mayhem of squat culture, Brutalist architecture, Anarcho-punk and sentimental pop tunes. Through the zine she is attempting to return the radical content to a much recuperated DIY punk aesthetic.

Through organizing launches and events a Savage Messiah collective coalesced around the zine. This became formalized in January of 2008 with the launch of collective WE ARE BAD. Their activities involve fly posting and interventions into specific significant locations focusing primarily on issues of gentrification, urban regeneration and the London Olympics.