Laura Porter Devon, United Kingdom

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Laura Porter (b. Lewisham, 1991) is based between North Devon and South London, and is the founding director and curator of Studio KIND in Barnstaple, Devon. Working with discarded clothing – a material that carries with it cyclical histories of land, worker, consumer and waste – Laura breaks down the garments to create a raw material that is re-formed into solid structures.

Intrinsically grounded in the traditions of craft and textiles art, her practice pushes back against an automated, digitised world and hierarchies of labour and material, instead placing value in slow, low-tech processes performed by the body. Using her own body as a site of action and a renewable energy source, Laura undertakes labour-intensive tasks in order to critique the idea of productivity as a measurable output of effectiveness.

Exploring the in-betweenness of repurposed materials and built environments, and the energies of consciousness that have been absorbed by these over time, she’s interested in how the man-made can evolve and shift into a quasi-living entity; a reflection of the natural world from which is derives. Laura re-imagines our material world as neither rigid nor organic - straddling the space between biological and human-made; rural and urban; lived and inactive.