BALTIC+

Laura Ford: Desperados

Laura Ford: Desperados
Library Shelf Location 18.FORD
Publication Date
Description

Ford’s sculptural imagination has always been double-edged: violence lurks within peaceable calm, horror within charm. In Desperados her outlook seems melancholic. The gallery is cluttered with childlike figures, soft and benign, dressed like schoolchildren in the playground, yet the patterns and textiles of their skin disguise their faces. A figure struggles to lift himself onto wooden stilts, another sits morosely in the corner, a pair trudge across the gallery floor and an ice skater has capsized, lying with legs akimbo in the soft, woolly snow. Ford is dramatising one of the most enduring and unnerving preoccupations of the last century: the sexual formation and social reproduction of adulthood. As Desperados demonstrates, education is not only a gentle and gradual tutoring but also a brutal, lonely and humiliating battle. These characters want desperately to be noticed, and with almost heroic proportions, they force themselves up one by one, carry their burden alone and recover from the inevitable scrapes and tumbles of childhood.

Quantity 1
Author Laura Ford
Format Paperback in paper Sleeve
Publisher Houldsworth Fine Art, London
Related Artist Laura Ford
Categories Installation, Sculpture
Related Event Desperados
Artist's Nationality British/UK
Language English

Other Artists

Other Recent Books