LOUD SPIRITS

Loud Spirits is an exhibition of new work by British multidisciplinary artist Laura Grace Ford, presenting an installation of paintings and a sound work made in collaboration with filmmaker and performance artist Noah Bador.

Working across writing, drawing, painting and sound, Ford's work examines the city, its urban spaces, memories, and the lived experiences found within its margins. Expanding on psychogeography and hauntology, Laura's practice is grounded in her use of both walking and writing to engage with the spatial and socio-political.

Loud Spirits takes its title from the English translation of 'Poltergeist' a German word which means 'noisy spirit', or 'loud ghost'. It implies a haunted, persistent and direct encounter with something returning from the past that interferes with the physical present.

Ford stages the gallery as a temporary, liminal space - whitewashing the walls and constructing an open wooden stud structure throughout. Reminiscent of half-built corridors and rooms, Ford uses the structure to display a suite of new paintings.

Executed in a distinct purple -and- pink colour palette, the paintings form a series of domestic interiors and still-life compositions imbued with a literary quality. Sketchy brushwork, washes of neon colour, and formal composition frame detailed painting that give focus to the subject matter of each.

Though devoid of people, each painting depicts a snapshot in time, or memory of a lived life - an unmade bed with sunlight partially alighting on crumpled sheets; a still life of heaped clothes with discarded boots and a spirit bottle ; a cropped scene of the street with acts of graffiti and torn posters.

Some of these paintings are constructed composites, made up from an archive of drawings and photographs of interiors and places collected by the artist, whilst others are taken directly from real life; being portraits of the artist's flat and studio, blurring the distinction between realist fact and romanticised fiction.

A new sound work is installed as a 5:1 multi-channel spatial sound piece. Composed from field recordings of the city and mixed with warped loops made from distorted song tracks, it is overlaid with a narrated psychogeographic text written by Ford and generated through her drifts and walks around London.

The story, magical realist and diaristic in tone speaks to a sense of transition and transformation. Taking place on Bonfire Night it describes a woman's nighttime journey that ends in a squat party on the city edge. The narrator describes their existential relationship to a changing London and their memories of it.

Whilst the city is a setting for drama, its physical streets, landmarks and features of the city are simultaneously protagonists, intimately intertwined with the lives of the characters who inhabit it.