Laura Aldridge presents California wow! at Tramway

Laura Aldridge presents a new installation for Tramway which reflects on her engagement with the relationship between art, craft and performance!

Article Source: Tramway
Last Updated: 26 February 2015 12:55

Drawing together sculpture, textile, print and ceramics, Aldridge's exhibition for Tramway 'California Wow!' sets up a vivid and tactile environment inhabited by a variety of large 'display-scapes' through which the viewer is invited to interact with the exhibition in various ways. The installation also acts a backdrop for dialogue about craft and contemporary art, creative processes, material experimentation and collaboration with many of the works in the exhibition being realised in partnership with Aldridge's friends and peers.

Aldridge creates performative environments or in her words 'expanded collages' in which she sets up a playful assemblage of materials, processes and textures that harbour sensory associations. These installations often situate the body in a myriad of ways; through the viewer’s physical interactions with the environment and through a constant sense of tactile engagement. This is evoked both by the evidence of hand made processes and ultimately the bodily responses her works provoke.

Entering Tramway we see a series of large ‘display-scapes’ staggered around the gallery which take their starting point from the Spanish Pavilion from the Triennial di Milano of 1951. The pavilion was an immersive environment in which the curators set up a dialogue between craft and contemporary art through an inventive and tactile display system. Initially informed by the artists’ desire to create a solution to presenting several bodies of work Aldridge has expanded this theme, likening the ‘display scapes’ to a series of mini exhibitions through which her conversations between materials, works and collaborators become apparent.

The human body is implied throughout the exhibition which features a number of backdrops and vessels within which suggested bodies are contained, or the viewers own body becomes an active agent. Large wooden forms which seem to be props for the body or vantage points, evoking both the act of looking whilst simultaneously implicating our own bodies as an intrinsic part of the installation. Aldridge describe these as ‘holes for a viewer to plug into’, a concept that permeates the exhibition, with each work being somehow activated by our bodies and interactions. The viewer is confronted with the impulse to touch and feel everywhere, yet there is also a sense that this desire is never pushed to completion. We are suspended somewhere between a sensory impulse of wanting to touch/ feel and simultaneously be felt by material and texture. It is at this intersection that Aldridge positions her works, exploring the notion of the body experienced as both object and subject. The sensory environments she creates directly imply our own bodies as agents within them, equally receptive to touch and sensation. The exhibition includes a number of fabric and ceramic works, reflecting Aldridge’s interest in materials which explore the emotional qualities of texture and touch.

The large pink pavilion Seemingly (viewing) (2015), a collaboration with Architect Iain MacLeod, also plays into this strategy of duality; when inside it we are voyeurs looking out on to the exhibition, but we are simultaneously contained and held within it, becoming part of the work to those looking in from the outside. Aldridge likens this to a filter and the tendency to use digital filters on instagram or our iphones to alter the mood of an image at whim, a symptom of today’s culture of instant visual gratification. In this case Aldridge applies a filter to the entire exhibition space, treating all her works with the same vivid, uniform wash of colour, highlighting the experience of looking. The colour pink making the action of viewing apparent and deliberate.

Themes of duality and performance continue throughout the exhibition, notably in the series of photographs shown along Tramway’s large brick wall have existed in various forms and been re-enacted using different models over several years. Thus the actions shown have been repeatedly performed for the camera, the gesture itself is always the same, always suspended somewhere between a photograph and a performance.

Aldridge deliberately unhinges things from their everyday reality; images are presented as physical objects, often using scale to set up a landscapes or backdrops through which the viewer is invited to move, entering into a tactile field of imagery. Often printed on light silk or transparent materials her banners move subtly so that the images become shifting forms. They are both a flat surface and an object, both two and three dimensional. Staggered across one side
of Tramway’s cavernous gallery they appear like banners moving across the space in a precession.

The legacy of the images Aldridge uses in her banners and other works is often everyday sources which Aldridge removes from their original scale, context and comfort zone. By expanding or enlarging everyday images and objects, she forces the viewer to reconfigure themselves and make sense of them in new ways. The large suns hanging around the space are enlarged images of car air fresheners made using enamel paint on metal titled, Be a Nose! (2014). Aldridge was drawn to one of these small objects and decided to enlarge it as a means to play around with its internal logic.

The title is taken from the 1959 comedy horror film ‘A Bucket of Blood’ by Roger Corman, depicting a young creative who struggles for validation within his artistic community. He is aided by the accidental killing of his neighbours’ pet cat and the consequent use of clay to hide the body and the evidence. An accidental criminal, embraced as artistic visionary, the film narrativises and nourishes Aldridge’s interest in the importance of chance, and the social dynamics of art-making. On another level, they are sunshine’s, a trope for happiness and joyfulness, but also they are all slightly different in character, they have faces and attitudes. They seem to be casting a sideways glance towards the exhibition or a knowing look to the side. Aldridge describes this look as recalling the moment when people remember details, ‘their eyes move up and to the left if they are right-handed. I like that this gesture could be a signifier for this.'

References to sunshine, colour, and more overtly California, are informed by Aldridge’s time spent there whilst studying at CalArts. Her time there and indeed notions of sunshine seem to inform her different approaches to colour, often using it in super saturated hues or vivid swathes so the works appear illuminated or animated by light. She also incorporates pastels or colours that look bleached out by the sun, implying that the work has been physically touched or its state altered by an application or its environment. Colour in Aldridge’s work is also bound up in process and the tactile experimentations with material – everywhere we look, it is died into concrete or fabric, or baked or glazed on to surfaces. The artist incorporates a number of different techniques and physical processes into the creation of colour, constructing landscapes of imagery that conjure up the sensuality of hand made process, but also the effects of time and external factors such as heat and light on the physical nature of an artwork.
The dialogue between art and craft is an overarching theme of Aldridge’s practice and informs many of the collaborations in ‘California wow!’ Aldridge is committed to experimenting with new materials and developing her practice as an open conversation with her peer group of artists, curators and makers. Honouring intuition, her casual yet ritualistic approach to making offers a valuable contribution to new dialogues recalibrating craft and conceptualism.

Aldridge sees herself as an active agent within the work, as opposed to being strictly a studio based practice she is engaging with collaborators and actively producing. In ‘California wow!’ There are several notable collaborations and the ‘display-scapes’ are used as a visual mode to display these. This is perhaps most apparent on Display-scape no. 1: Enjoy reading this with your body (and you know, once you’ve learned it, you know it) (2015) towards the back of the space. Bobby Niven has made a series nails sculptures that form a cactus like backdrop to several of Aldridge’s own works and two silk banners titled Taking back our bodies (refund please), a series of text based prints on silk is an ongoing collaboration with the Director of the arts organisation Studio Voltaire, Joe Scotland. The two friends composed the text based works from an amalgamation of a series of letters written between themselves, with subjects ranging from Joe Spence, to self-love and photo-therapy. Display-scape no.2: BRICKwork – A misleading, whole new way to do things (or so they say). (2015), the ceramic brick mural we encounter on entering the space grew out of a collaboration with the ceramic artist Alistair Dearie who uses the brick form within his work. Stacked edge to edge instead of face down the work makes the normally hidden surface of the brick visible, embracing the holes as an aesthetic design feature rather than a function. The large pink structure, Seemingly (viewing) (2015) is a collaboration with Architect Iain MacLeod. The work is something of a motif or an anchor point for the entire exhibition and the artist has described it as the ‘Californian room’.

Laura Aldridge (b. 1978, Frimley, England) graduated from the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2006 where she undertook an academic exchange to the MFA programme at The California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles.