Laura White
London-based artist Laura White grew up in rural Worcestershire and her relationship to the natural environment remains important to her practice, which involves a direct engagement with her surroundings as a way of understanding the world. White’s sculptures bring into focus trees and fungi and their connectivity through mycelium, the network of fungal threads often found underground. The sculptures respond visually and scientifically to the ways trees and fungi grow, for example how fungi adapt and change in relation to their environment as opposed to a fixed plan.
The largest sculpture, Pollute Volute: Rise 1, 2021 is formed from layers of coloured silicone rubber separated by tissue paper, hand built from the bottom up relying on the artist’s use of her body. Mirroring the adaptability found in nature, each layer responds to the layer below, leading the sculptures to rise, bend and twist in a relational way. Elsewhere, smaller works such as Spurtive 1, 2022, also reveal traces of the artist’s body, this time through the finger and thumb impressions used to build the sculpture’s form.
Silicone rubber, the flexible and heat-resistant plastic material used to make these works, reflects our polluted and industrialised world. It is a non-biodegradable material found in many familiar household objects, which is difficult to recycle and contributes to environmental pollution. The material was donated to the artist due it being pastits shelf date and therefore of no use, commercially. Rather than see the material go to waste, the artist explored its material properties, repurposing it into art that connects us with the natural world.
Works on show:
Pollute Volute: Rise 1. Silicone rubber and tissue paper. 326 x 50 x 50cm. 2021
Pollute Volute: Adaptive 1. Silicone rubber. 235 x 63 x 70cm. 2022
Spate 1. Silicone rubber. 98 x 15 x 15 cm. 2022.
Spate 3. Silicone rubber. 39 x 80 x 56 cm. 2022.
Spurtive 1. Silicone rubber. 89 x 25 x 20cm 2022.