Laura Aldridge

LAWNMOWER
11/05 – 29/09/2024
Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh

This new installation by Laura Aldridge brings together the cosmic with the everyday, building a world filled with fictions, songs, luscious colour and sensual texture. Aldridge’s warm energy and generous approach imbue her vibrant and tactile work with a sense of freedom and play.

This body of work was initially inspired by a doll in The Secret Collection, Paisley: a high gloss ceramic figure with a dyed, hand-stitched skirt. Aldridge’s lights combine alchemical glazes with naturally dyed fabric, creating a push and pull between dualities. Her work explores the relationship between inside and outside, synthetic and natural, thinking through these contrasts on a bodily and architectural scale.

Aldridge is a founder of Sculpture House, Ferguslie Park, Paisley; this informs her approach and creative life among friends and collaborators. She uses domestic and found materials that recall the rhythm and care of daily life and its rituals; a trio of loveseats in the exhibition provide places to rest and act as an antidote to loss and a celebration of friendship and love.

Aldridge holds space for others to be creative; her videos, made in collaboration with Juliana Capes, Morwenna Kearsley and Sarah McFadyen, combine a playful post-punk sensibility with improvisation and visual poetry. The videos were developed from audio descriptions by Juliana Capes based on artworks by Aldridge. These layers of interpretation – visual and auditory, seen and imagined – are sensitively woven together through the chorus of voices, psychedelic washes of colour, animation, found footage and lo-fi techniques.

Outdoors in the Ballroom Garden, A Cosmic Reset is a fountain constructed from spiralling shells, referencing the snail as one of many organisms that comprise the diverse ecosystem at Jupiter Artland. The work uses the sonorous drip and gush of water as a material alongside Aldridge’s stacked sculptural forms and painterly glazes.