Laura Ford

I have lived and worked most of my adult life in London but recently moved to the West Sussex countryside making work in my new studio at The Black Barn.  Although I continue to explore much of the same themes I am finding that things are quietly shifting as I respond to my new environment.

I have always enjoyed gardening and placing my work in the landscape but now instead of just white walls, I have fields, woods, paths, ponds and a lake with islands to play with, to plant, landscape and dream in.
Much of my work is about different emotional states and I am interested in how the sculpture can be placed or made within the landscape to amplify or temper that experience.

Our relationship to the land seems fundamentally important.  The grounds at The Black Barn are a wonderful testing ground for exploring the emotions that can arise from our interventions in the landscape.  Through the educational programme at MATTBLACKBARN I am looking forward to sharing these sculptural experiments with our visiting groups.

 Recently I have become president of the Royal Society of Sculptors and I have enjoyed being involved with such a broad group of artists with very diverse practices all of whom are grappling with how to make sculpture, with what material, scale and technique, how it sits in the world and interacts with its environment, physically and intellectually.  I am hoping that we will be able to promote the same kinds of discussions through our program of events and visits at MATTBLACKBARN.