Laura White: DAILY BAROQUE

2025
Dough, Porcelain and Mixed Media

MORE INFORMATION

Daily Baroque. Dough mix, porcelain, food colouring, MDF, paint and concrete blocks. Dimensions variable. 2025.
2025

Laura White: DAILY BAROQUE
2025

Laura White: DAILY BAROQUE 2025

Dough, Porcelain and Mixed Media

Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, UK

20 September – 9 November 2025

Daily Baroque showcases her ongoing exploration of dough as a sculptural medium. Laura’s practice is driven by an interest in how chosen materials assert agency and how failure can be harnessed in the creation of work.

Working with different types of dough or with materials such as silicone rubber, she pushes materials to their limits, to the point of failure, then accepting, adapting to and incorporating that failure to create an exceptional body of work.

Daily Baroque combines newly made pieces created from pasta dough with older porcelain works. These elements are mixed and spread across the gallery on low platforms. They seem to be captured in flux, perhaps the remnants of a larger work, or a museum display that has suffered a catastrophic collapse.

There is dynamism and tension in this presentation informed by the dough, a material that though rendered into sculpture remains organic and mutable, its captured balance here perhaps anticipating changes, shifts and falls during the run of the exhibition.

Drawing on sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s belief in his ability to render stone to look as soft as dough, the work references Baroque marble statuary and has the same tactility. The dough pieces with their delicate pinkish hues feel like both stone and flesh.

For one week of the exhibition 29 October – 2 November Laura White will be in residence making bread in the gallery, which will be shared and eaten with visitors.

The Baroque Bakery

Photographs by Bernard Mills

Listen below to a conversation between Laura White and Phoenix Art Space curator Laurence Hill. The conversation touches on the exhibition, Laura’s practice, bread making and the Baroque amongst other things

Daily Baroque explores my continued investigation of dough as a sculptural medium. An installation of dough, ceramic and silicone rubber works sit alongside a micro bakery for sculptural bread. This is the first time, in an exhibition, that I have brought together these two practices, placing bread and its production at the heart of my sculptural practice.

My work is foremost a material investigation. I am led by my materials and aim to collaborate with them, rather than imposing myself on them. I am attracted to materials and processes that are difficult to control, resist being fixed and challenge me physically. It is important for me not to plan what I’m going to do but to start a journey with a material and see where it takes and pushes me. Exposure to the breaks, mistakes and failures of materials opens new directions and possibilities.

During a recent residency in Rome, I was focused on daily activities around food, such as the making of bread and pasta. At the same time, I was considering the flamboyant and dramatic style of the Baroque, particularly the unique sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who carved stone to appear as soft as dough, for wealthy and powerful patrons. This collision between the everyday and the exceptional, which interests me very much, has informed this exhibition and is reflected in the exhibition title.

The installation in the main space brings together three object collections. Porcelain, mixed clay ceramics and dried dough works. The white porcelain pieces were originally commissioned by Meadow Arts as part of an exhibition at Museum of Royal Worcester in 2018. Mostly functional in type, these works respond to both the museum’s collection and contemporary vessels. These replicas have been manipulation and intentionally damaged – ripped, torn and squashed. A selection of this collection is arranged amongst recent ceramic works made from coloured clays, dried reinforced dough works marbled with food colourings, interrupted by two white silicone rubber sculptures.

Recognisable objects and abstract forms collide in an unraveling where the everyday is wrapped up in the dramatic flowing style of the Baroque. Teapots melt and dough tongues lap and lick.

I like making bread as a way of re-thinking my processes for making sculpture. Focused on the experience of my body in relation to these materials, these works reflect a visceral experience of inside and outside the body (human and animal). This is taken quite literally when I make bread sculpture for eating.

I do not distinguish between bread dough and other materials to make work, I manipulate and learn from them all, it’s just that some are intended to be eaten. As part of the exhibition, the rear gallery houses a micro bakery and for one week of the exhibition (29 October – 2 November) I will be in residence making my ‘Baroque Bread’, to be shared and eaten the same day.

Laura White

September 2025