Free and open to all
Drop in to experience artist Laura Marker’s work
This event is part of a series of micro residencies in The Everybody Gallery, with a range of artists working with us over the coming months. Check out this page for more information.
About the Project
During her residency in The Everybody Gallery, Laura will be building on work produced for the Quiet Earth Project; a site-specific projection based installation developed over a 10-day period, investigating habitat loss and biodiversity fragmentation within the urban/suburban environment. For this project, Laura created a series of free standing sculptural forms made from wood and tracing paper, which acted as projection screens for collated video and photographic material.
Laura began by creating experimental photography and film clips documenting locations that she had identified as ‘countryside islands’ within the local urban/suburban environment. These islands are areas that include a mixture of undeveloped green space alongside ancient features. Laura identified the locations whilst walking within local green spaces and by charting changes to the land using historical maps, records and pictorial documentation. Laura is drawn to researching/documenting these areas because of the way in which we connect and respond to these environments in the present day and the way that these spaces connect us to the past and to the natural world. These important, bio-diverse sites provide sub/urban residents access to nature conjuring up ideas relating to the passing of time whilst speaking of the fragility and precariousness of the natural environment.
For Laura, Quiet Earth raised as many questions as it answered, so she hopes that this residency will provide the chance to develop and extend ideas and techniques and resolve concepts. Laura will be focusing on the ancient, unchanged aspects of the selected ‘islands’ and communicate the way in which modern development has surrounded, encroached upon and all but swallowed up these remnant spaces. By combining imagery that shows the historical and contemporary contexts for my chosen locations Laura aims to create an installation that gives the effect of looking outward and inward, backward and forward at the same time.
Photos © Laura Marker
About the Artist
Laura Marker studied at Wimbledon College of Art and primarily works as a site-specific installation artist, merging together a range of media including projection, video, experimental photography, digital collage and drawing/print. She deals with a range of topics including concepts relating to the history of observation, the place of women in society, the interconnectedness of nature and landscape fragmentation within the suburban/urban environment. Although appearing to be a disparate selection of topics, key themes link these areas including the passage of time, ideas of loss, memory, smothering, recollection and uncovering the invisible. Her work is research-led and frequently makes use of historical records as part of the development process.
Recent installation works such as ‘Quiet Earth’ and ‘Recollections of a Fragmented Landscape’ take inspiration from wild spaces located within suburban/urban settings. The artist documents these wild spaces as they are found today and also identifies changes that have affected these landscapes using data and information gathered from old maps and records. Discoveries from the historic documents are then compared and contrasted to the contemporary landscape of each chosen location. By tracing the history of these areas to their countryside origins and considering the encroachment of the modern built environment of the last few centuries she has come to consider these suburban/urban wild spaces as pockets of left behind ‘countryside’ - islands or fragments of a pre-industrial landscape acting as an echo of a past environment that has mainly been lost.
For more information about Laura and her work, check out www.lauramarker.co.uk and follow Laura on Instagram or Facebook.