In a brilliant lecture about her creative practice and research platform Tenderfoot, Artist and writer Laura White introduces our Fine Art students to a range of strategies to rethink and reimagine the stuff of our material world.
Laura’s work revolves around a ‘negotiation with the world of STUFF’, and seeks to examine our interactions with materials and objects and ask critical questions about their ‘value, profile, association, meaning and behavior’. Laura is fascinated with the ways Things act as both material stuff and anthropological signifiers, that are capable of revealing the human condition – vulnerabilities and capabilities, value systems affected by consumerism and material status, and objects/human dependencies.
During the workshop, our students asked all manner of questions including ‘how might sound enable us to describe what a hole feels like‘, ‘why a thin film of plastic, frustrates the hands’ desire to touch and be touched‘ and ‘what does the internet weigh? ‘. In a discussion around one of the workshop activities, Fine Art Student Amelie Peace described watching her blindfolded classmate Rose Shuckburgh work out what she was holding as an ‘almost sensuous experience’.
At CGLAS the essential properties of all things, whether they are paper-thin, hard as nails, soft to the touch, sticky, slimy or digitalized, fascinate us. Laura’s lecture and workshop gave us an inspired insight into how such research preoccupations can be made manifest in material things.
