Laura Aldridge

On The Table was commissioned by The Drive Project produced in collaboration with Designer Laura Spring
June 20025

On the Table was commissioned by The Drive Project as part of their Recovery Through the Arts programme with veterans. Developed and realised in collaboration with textile designer Laura Spring, we made the work together at Edinburgh Printmakers, before returning to the Assembly Rooms for a shared dinner where everything came alive.

I’ve always thought of the table as something more than furniture. It holds weight and meaning — it’s where people gather, where food and conversation flow, where care is exchanged. With this project, I wanted to extend that idea: to see what happens when the very fabric of the table — the cloths, the bowls, the plates — are made by the people who will sit around it.

In the studio, the act of making became its own kind of conversation. Veterans, many of whom had never picked up a print roller or moulded clay before, found their rhythm alongside one another. Printing patterns, shaping forms, layering colours — each gesture was both individual and shared, woven into the atmosphere of the workshop. The objects carried these traces, imperfect and alive.

When we finally laid the table and sat down together, the work shifted. We weren’t just looking at what we had made, we were living inside it — eating from it, touching it, being held by it. The tablecloths bore the imprint of our hands, the bowls carried our food, the napkins were folded into our laps. In that moment, creativity, nourishment, and companionship dissolved into one another.

It felt at once completely everyday — a group of people eating a meal — and deeply extraordinary. Every mouthful, every glance across the table, was bound up with the labour and joy of making. The dinner became the final act of the artwork: the moment where everything fused, and a temporary community, fragile and vivid, held itself together.

For me, On the Table is less about objects and more about what they enable: gathering, listening, sharing, and belonging. The table became both stage and shelter — a site of recovery, expression and connection — reminding us of the quiet power of coming together and the beauty of being sustained by what we make with our own hands.