CityLife

New visions, old images - reinventing with Laura White

Dynamo Bi-k, 2007 1 / 5 images

GET the light right or massage your mind into an imaginative mood and the most everyday, familiar objects can look beautiful, strange and sinister: pegs, safety pins, postcards, all kinds of brightly coloured junk can take on a temporary significance.  

This type of fleeting transformation is at the heart of Laura White’s latest exhibition at Castlefield Gallery, If I Had A Monkey I Wouldn't Need A TV.

It lives up to it’s whimsical moniker by combining everyday elements in a collision of commonplace images and sculptural forms, and is a riot of ideas working together in a way that is at the same time irreconcilable and symbiotic.  

“It’s this relationship between image and object that I’m fascinated with,” explains Laura, “because the way we deal with images and the way we deal with objects are very, very different.  

Fascination

“Being someone who’s an object based person, but with a fascination with imagery - but never wanting to make just an image on its own - its how you deal with that which intrigues me.” 

Despite Laura being an object based practitioner -  a sculptor who teaches at Goldsmith College and Manchester Metropolitan University - this exhibition is over flowing with images and found objects, carefully arranged, deconstructed and reconstructed into something deceptively chaotic.  

“I’m talking about the kind of images we see all the time: posters, photographic imagery, imagery you see in newspapers, magazines, imagery that we’re constantly surrounded by.

"For example in these small pieces here,” she points to a collection of small plastic animals smothered in billowing, butterfly-like masses of cut out pictures, “these are images from encyclopaedias that I had as a kid and I was always fascinated by the imagery rather than what was being said about the imagery.

“When you take them out of context they have a very strange meaning, and when you start to play with them; you almost forget their meaning and think about just the image and what the composition is without considering what it means. “ 

Pound shops

Constructed onsite in the week preceding the exhibition, there is a sense the objects have already escaped their previous context and meaning.

Many objects were sourced from pound shops, selected and arranged in an intuitive manner. rather than along any traditional lines - with haphazard precision. Plinths are conspicuously absent.  

The exhibition may be strange and a little unsettling, but it is also quite beautiful and fun. Was creating it fun? 

“What was really enjoyable about this show is that I’ve had a week here to work on site. I really like working this way, I really like responding to the space; the space becomes really important to my work."

If I Had A Monkey I Wouldn't Need A TV is at Castlefield Gallery, off Deansgate, until January 25, 2009. Entry is free (Wednesday-Sunday).