Laura Oldfield Ford

Laura Oldfield Ford
Abandoned McDonalds
© The artist

Series two of Conversation Pieces begins with Laura Oldfield Ford considering the apocalyptic work of John Martin in the Sublime Display in Room 9, which will be visited as part of the talk.

Her own work depicts dystopian scenes and post-apocalyptic urban ruins. Taking her immediate habitat as inspiration, Ford makes work that imagines a future London which simultaneously sifts through the detritus of history. She weaves in narratives and personal histories, both her own and others occupying the same territory through past, present and future, resulting in an examination of London through different lenses. Semiotic ghosts haunt the desolate landscapes depicted in ballpoint pen, fluorescent spray paint and acrylic.


Laura Oldfield Ford
Savage Messiah Issue 8
© The artist

Since 2005 Ford has been making a zine called 'Savage Messiah' which uses apocalyptic language and imagery to create a sense of prescience and unease. Religious references are recuperated to scry into Britain's socio-economic future. Responding to the gentrification, or 'yuppification', of east London, Ford wishes to activate the past in order to conjure up a different future of ruptures in the smooth space of late capitalism.

Ford, originally from Halifax, West Yorkshire, completed a Fine Art Painting MA at The Royal College of Art in 2007 and has since become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism.

In one sense the drawings allow for a chronicling of a disappearing London, and she has recently produced over a hundred ballpoint pen drawings as part of an ongoing project chronicling the impact of regeneration on London, 2013, Drifting through the ruins.

The drawings form a broken narrative, focusing on the part of east London currently being cleared for the 2012 Olympic site. Ford has made many walks through these abandoned areas and imagines them populated by the semiotic ghosts of failed utopias in the year 2013.

She writes on her website 'The London I conjure up in these drawings is imbued with a sense of mourning. These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates'.

To view some more of Laura Oldfield Ford's work please click here.