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Hales Gallery: Laura Oldfield Ford - London 2013, Drifting through the ruins - 30 Jan 2009 to 14 Mar 2009 Current Exhibition |
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Laura Oldfield Ford
Aylesbury Burgess Park, 2008 Acrylic and ball point pen on watercolour paper |
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LAURA OLDFIELD FORD LONDON 2013, DRIFTING THROUGH THE RUINS. Private view: Thursday 29 January, 6-8pm Exhibition dates: 30 January � 14 March 2009 Hales Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of gallery newcomer Laura Oldfield Ford. Oldfield Ford, originally from Halifax, West Yorkshire, completed a fine art Painting MA at The Royal College of Art in 2007 and has since become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism. The main focus of the show is more than one hundred ink drawings that Oldfield Ford has recently produced as part of an ongoing project chronicling the impact of regeneration on London called 2013, Drifting through the ruins. The drawings form a broken narrative, focusing on part of east London currently being cleared for the 2012 Olympic site and documents the city as palimpsest, a site of perpetual writing and over-writing. Oldfield Ford has made many walks (or �Drifts�) through these abandoned areas and imagines them populated by the semiotic ghosts of failed utopias in the year 2013. �The London I conjure up in these drawings is imbued with a sense of mourning. These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates�. Her work has developed from the cheaply produced Zine, entitled Savage Messiah and it�s sister website http://www.savagemessiahzine.com which has become a regular vehicle for her psychogeographic explorations of the metropolis. Each episode explores a different region of London, focusing particularly on those areas that are earmarked for significant structural change. The resulting text and pages of intricate drawings become a document to Oldfield Ford�s experience. The completed issues one to ten will be available for viewing during the show, which form a subjective mapping of the city from Heathrow to Hackney Wick. Something that would appear quite ordinary for most, provides Oldfield Ford with poetic contemplation and possibilities from which her drawings can develop. It is this balance between the politics of the �kitchen sink�, prevalent in so much of the best British Post War art and the physiological vibrations from the past and future city that Oldfield Ford skillfully taps into, that make this work so relevant right now. Alongside the show of drawings and Zines, Oldfield Ford has planned a night of films exploring psychogeographic themes and the launch of her new Zine accompanied by a live broadcast from Resonance FM and a daytime walking tour around Stratford and the perimeter site of the Olympics, with members of the London Psychogeographical Association and We Are Bad collective. Event dates: Saturday 21 February, Drift Walk Thursday 5 March, Film Night Saturday 14 March, Zine launch Please check our website for more details and to book a place. Laura Oldfield Ford lives and works in London. She studied at the Slade School of Art and completed her MA Painting at the Royal College of Art. Selected Group exhibitions include: 2008 Freedom Centre, Hales Gallery, London; Valerie Beston Award, Marlborough Fine Art, London; The Golden Record, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, UK. 2007 Fusion Now, curated by JJ Charlesworth, Rokeby Gallery, London; Publish and be Damned, Rochelle school, London, UK. 2006 Spent, Group show RCA painters, Three Colts, London; AAABAM Indexed, curated by Liam Gillick, ICA, London. For further information and images please visit www.halesgallery.com or contact Hales Gallery on 0044 (0)20 7033 1938 or press @halesgallery.com REVIEW Laura Oldfield Ford Frieze review of London 2013, Drifting through the ruins 'At Hales Gallery Ford sets one version of urban poetics � in which brutalism co-exists with dereliction � against the hygienic, hyper-bright spaces projected by late-capitalist development, where the future contracts into the short term, and all history is PhotoShopped into a manicured �heritage�. Collage is central to Ford�s method, indeed, the whole of this exhibition is perhaps best seen viewed as an unfinished collage, which � like the city � is constantly reconfiguring itself. Ford colours and graffitis her own drawings, treating them like urban walls, as surfaces to be decorated and defaced. Macro- and micro-narratives proliferate tuberously between the drawings; spidery slogans recur; figures migrate through various versions of the city, sometimes trapped inside the drearily glossy spaces imagined by advertising and regeneration propaganda, sometimes free to drift. Ford�s city is the site of the kind of ontological and temporal war that rages throughout the fiction of William Burroughs: a struggle over the nature of reality between the spectres of speculation and the ghosts of unrealized utopias'. Mark Fisher Frieze.com |
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