Laura Ford (born 1961) is a Welsh artist and sculptor who has exhibited her work at the British Art Show and represented Wales at Venice Biennale.[1] She is recognised internationally as one of the UK's leading sculptors and is included in important museum collections worldwide[2]
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Ford was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1961. She was born into a family of Welsh showmen who travelled the fairgrounds of Wales and South West England; wintering at her grandfather Charles Yeates'[3] farm, a former zoo, near Cardiff.[4] As a child travelling on the fairground, Ford has said that her favourite sideshow attraction was a "huge figure of Frankenstein's monster". She recalled, to The Daily Telegraph in 2003, that the figure would leap out of the booth and chase her, noting:
You knew perfectly well that it would happen, but it was always incredibly exciting. It is that uncertainty I am aiming for in my work.[5]
She studied at Bath Academy of Art (1978–82)which included a highly influential term of study at the Cooper Union School of Art[6] in New York City. Completing her Bachelor's degree with a First, she was included in the Institute of Contemporary Arts[7] New Contemporaries Exhibition[8] at London's Serpentine Gallery[9] in the summer of 1983. Her Master's degree followed at the Chelsea School of Art (1982–83) where she met her partner, fellow sculptor, Andrew Sabin.[10] Ford and Sabin toured, traveled and lectured on art in India for a year in 1985.
Thus far in her career Ford has shown her work at over 20 different solo venues and over 45 group exhibitions. Numerous different organisations have collections of her work, including: the Tate Gallery in London, Penguin Books and Prudential. Elspeth and Imogen Turner Collection (Lancashire,UK)[11] Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent;[12] National Museums and Galleries of Wales;[13] Museum of Modern Art, University of Iowa;[14] Arts Council of Great Britain;[15] Contemporary Art Society;[16] Unilever plc;[17] Penguin Books;[18] Government Collection;[19] the Oldham Art Gallery[20] and Dandara Jersey 'Percentage for Art'[21] in the Channel Islands and most recently a solo show at the Frederic Meijer Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan[22]
In an interview with David Lomas at the Manchester Art Gallery in 2005, Ford admitted to being influenced by surrealism, with the filmmakers Jean Cocteau and David Lynch being at of the forefront of the interest.[23]
Some of her best-known sculptures are primarily constructed in fabric, with unidentifiable characters (consisting of humans and animals) partaking in different actions.[24] In 1999, one of Ford's creations, entitled Moose,[25] was featured in the Tate Gallery. It was one of a series of sculptures built around the idea of costumed animals. Much of the Moose was covered in ordinary garments and general domestic DIY items consisting of plaster, chicken wire, scaffolding poles and grey fabric.[4]
Ford and fellow artist Carol Rhodes[26] were featured on a video edition of Art in Scotland[27] in 2001. Ford described her work Chintz Girls[28] as being inspired by the oppressive atmospheres of middle-class lounges.[29]
In 2003, Ford exhibited Headthinkers at the Houldsworth Gallery[30] in London's Cork Street.[31] The show consisted of several child-sized beings wearing "pensioner"-esque clothing with large ceramic donkey heads resting on white platforms. Their clothes consisted of dark coloured jumpers, wool trousers and tartan slippers.[32] The boys appear to be unable to support themselves because of their oversized ass heads. The eight 44-inch (1,100 mm) figures, made from steel, fabric, plaster and ceramic heads, were for sale at £10,000 each.[5] One such figure was a centrepiece of Sleeping and Dreaming, a collaborative exhibition between the Deutsches Hygene-Museum,[33] Dresden and the Wellcome Collection, London in 2008.,[34] and has now been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
In 2005 Ford joined eight other 'emerging and midcareer British artists' at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art[35] in Connecticut, USA, in a group show entitled "Into My World: Recent British Sculpture,".[36] Other featured artists were Matt Franks,[37] Roger Hiorns,[38] James Ireland,[39] Jim Lambie,[40] Mike Nelson,[41] Mariele Neudecker,[42] David Thorpe[43] and Saskia Olde Wolbers.[44] Ford's "Headthinkers" was positioned in the museum's grand reception area which was specially turned into exhibition space for the display. Her later installation, "Wreckers,"[45] was positioned the adjoining hallway.
Ford represented her native Wales in the Venice Biennale in the summer of 2005[46]
Armour Boys,[47] a series of pieces made during a residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop,[48] consisted of a group of child-size knights in armour, seemingly fallen in battle. The work was first shown at the 2006 Edinburgh Art Festival at the Royal Scottish Academy,[49] Edinburgh. Critic, Rosie Lesso, of The List, called the exhibition "surprisingly underwhelming". Further noting that the boys were "twisted and broken [...] drawing attention to the many youths caught up in war today".[50] Armour Boys has been further exhibited at Roche Court Sculpture Park in Wiltshire UK, and Harewood House[51] a stately home in Leeds, England.[52] exhibited at Skulptur Pilane, Sweden during the summer of 2008.[53]
The Contemporary Art Society[16] presented Ford's Rag and Bone[54] exhibition at the Economist Plaza[55] in late 2007 and early 2008. Ford sculpted the pieces, which were based on characters from the stories and illustrations of Beatrix Potter, to show "the sanitised spaces of consumerism and the homeless and disenfranchised who often exist on their margins". The pieces in the exhibition included Badger, a badger, going through a bin, Mrs Tiggywinkle, a hedgehog, pushing a pram full of her belongings, and Tod, the fox, wrapped in blankets, representing homelessness.[56]
Rag and Bone was displayed in Tilburg, Netherlands in 2008 as part of the "Lustwarande 08 – Wanderland" group exhibition at The Fundament Foundation Tilburg.[57]
Her bronze work from Rag and Bone, Fox with Blanket was acquired by the City of Stockholm and is on permanent display in the city centre[58]
In 2008 she produced new work in bronze for her first solo exhibition at the New Art Centre, including three fairy-tale espaliered trees with human feet and legs, cast in bronze.[59]
In 2009 Ford was commissioned to produce a site-specific work 'The Weeping Girls' for Jupiter Artland[60] sculpture park near Edinburgh. Reviewed in The Spectator in July 2010, the work was described variously in The Spectator as[61] "Menacing is a word that could be applied to much of the work at Jupiter Artland. Weeping Girls by Laura Ford is a very disquieting work, a series of figures set in different poses amongst the trees, each a little girl hiding her face behind a ropey curtain of thick hair. The figures are somehow reminiscent of an unsettling memorial from a Victorian graveyard", commenting Claudia Massie in August, whilst Nicola Mc Cartney adds for the September issue that Ford’s "Weeping Girls haunt the forest’s unsuspecting corners so that one never feels quite alone."'[62]
The Weeping Girls are simultaneously being, along with Lion[63] displayed at Skulptur Pilane, Sweden 2010, Sweden[64]
Ford was formerly represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London from 2000.[65] She has had several solo exhibitions with Houldsworth including Desperados 2001;[66] Headthinkers 2003;[67] Wreckers 2004;[68] and Disagreeable People 2008[69]
Ford is now solely represented by Christian Scheffel of Galerie Scheffel in Bad Homburg, Germany[70]
Three bronze sculptures, Nature Girls were stolen from Surrey Water, Rotherhithe in October 2008. They remain missing.[92]
In addition in 1999 Laura Ford's Stump Girl, part of the same trio, was stolen from the British High Commission in Ottawa. "The theft of a bronze sculpture of a humanoid tree from outside the British High Commission in Ottawa has stumped police and diplomats alike, with hopes of a ransom demand fading as weeks pass without a clue". Stump Girl, a one-metre-tall statue with a stump torso and girlish, ruby-slippered legs, was abducted overnight in November from its place among a trio of sculptures outside the downtown mission.[93]