Laura Oldfield Ford

RESEARCH ON LAURA OLDFIELD FORD IN RESPONSE TO ASSESMENT FEEDBACK

Laura uses ballpoint pen, acrylic and spraypaint to psycogeograph urban British environments. She regularly covers themes of urban decay and architecture, focusing not on London's visually pleasing and heavily gentrified areas of what she calls "playschool architecture" but instead the distopian concrete tower blocks of Harlow, Stevenage and Hatfield.


Although the specific subject matter she covers isn't of much interest to me, I really like the way she layers refined pen work over graffiti handstyles to capture an essence of the way cultures are layered over each other in the tight spaces of London tower blocks. It highlights the way spaces and lives are crammed in over each other and how the histories of the people existing there overlap, with culture and identity underlaying the structured shapes of the regimental architecture.

It produces an interesting meeting of styles with it's roots in both the classical landscape study and new media wildstyle graffiti and urban art, which cleverly captures the juxtaposition between the contemporary modern city sprawl and it's rapid decay and delapidation which happen in synchronism.