Laura Aldridge
sumVigour
19 June – 29 August 2021
Entry to this exhibition is free and by pre-booked appointment
Pre-booked appointments are available in hourly time-slots
Thursday-Sunday, 11am-4pm
On those days we will have a drop-in hour 1-2pm. No booking is needed in that hour but we will manage how many people are in the exhibition at any one time
Laura Aldridge lives and works in Glasgow. She works with a broad range of media; photography, textiles, ceramics and glass are all incorporated into a practice that she describes as an expanded form of collage.
Aldridge’s work often explores the double-bind of subjectivity and objectivity, making versus experiencing, viewing versus participating. In recent installations she has explored questions of display and presentation, though over the past year, she has emphasised more open-ended making. Her sculptures invite an impulsive response that is interrupted by the barrier of not being able to physically engage with the work itself. At this intersection Aldridge allows the intuitive and the sensory to unfold.
Aldridge has a forthcoming project in Glasgow International June 2021 with Leanne Ross, Judith Scott: The Outside is Inside Everything We Make. Recent solo exhibitions have included; #fromKStoyou, Kunsthalle Stavanger, Norway (2020 –2021); Indirect Sunlight – Laura Aldridge and James Rigler, New Gallery, London, (2018); Plant Scenery of the World, Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2017); Go Woman Go!, British Council in Nigeria Season, Abuja, Nigeria (2016); Inside All My Activities, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2016); One to another, one-to-one, Passerelle Centre d‘art contemporain, Brest (2015); California wow!, Tramway, Glasgow (2015) and Laura Aldridge, Studio Voltaire, London (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: I am a Dependent Object, Biennial of Contemporary Art Brno, Czech Republic (2019); Perceptions, National Gallery of Kosovo, Museul Contemporary Art Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Musuem of Contemporary Art, Macedonia (2018-2019); Things That Soak You, Kate MacGarry, London (2017).
We are pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by artist Laura Aldridge: sumVigour. In this exhibition, Aldridge presents a group of ten new works created in her studio over the last few months, which offer new developments in surface, scale, arrangement and sensory affect in her use of ceramic and textiles. A mixture of wall-based and freestanding work, she brings them together at CAMPLE LINE in the distinctive proportions of the upstairs gallery.
The exhibition runs until 29 August 2021 and is accompanied by a new text by Oliver Basciano.
Vibrant and tactile, Laura Aldridge’s work engages, indeed embraces, all our senses. Taking many forms and scales, her work derives from her deep-seated instinct for colour and texture, and from the knowing and intuitive approach she takes to making and to materials and their possibilities. She has said: ‘Being completely absorbed in the process of making, being alert and open is really very important to how an idea develops. It is physical research and it is how I move the work forward.’
Working across textiles, glass, ceramic and found objects, and with processes such as printing, casting and dyeing, Aldridge’s body of work moves freely between wall-based reliefs and sculptural assemblages or installations, playing on the abilities of ‘collage’ to operate in two and three-dimensions. She has herself described her work as a form of expanded collage, and she often arranges elements of her works upon tables, low plinths or across gallery walls to bring ‘things’ together so that they might coalesce as a whole.
Of the exhibition’s title, sumVigour, Aldridge has explained: ‘I wanted to combine some words, to make a new thought for what I was doing. ‘Sum’ works for me because to hear it, you could be saying ‘some’ – as in ‘with some vigour’- but to see and read it – it speaks of addition, of two or more of something. Then, to have that mundane word next to something much bigger and more assertive – VIGOUR. I like it because it speaks to something beyond the singular – to groups, combines, and energy.’
Included in sumVigour is a group of six large-scale ceramic vessels that sit upon their own plinth systems or what Aldridge calls ‘texture totems’. Alongside these are two new works that develop Aldridge’s on-going Things That Soak You series (2016 – ongoing), and two new framed collages featuring wind chimes, which extend recent works made for Edinburgh and Stavanger in Norway.