Roche Court, East Winterslow, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP5 1BG Open daily 11am – 4pm, Tel: 01980 862244 Email: [email protected] www.sculpture.uk.com

PRESS RELEASE

Laura Ford: Days of Judgement 24 November 2012 – 3 February 2013

Laura Ford is best known for her portrayals of animals, with which she explores aspects of the human condition. For the new body of work shown in the Gallery at Roche Court, her starting point was Masaccio’s fresco ‘The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden’. In Ford’s postlapsarian vision, however, the characters of Adam and Eve are reconfigured as a group of very tall, skinny cats covered from head to foot in black fabric.

Pacing the Gallery floor in various states of distress, these cats appear like a group of existential poets gripped by their own inner anxieties. Silhouetted against the backdrop of the Gallery walls, they are additionally redolent of the self-absorbed figures in a Lowry painting, but like the character of Behemoth in Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’ or even Dr Seuss’ ‘The Cat in the Hat’, they also generate an atmosphere of anarchy and wantonness. Two further cats, cast in bronze, stride through the Sculpture Park; with their featureless faces they have an uncanny blankness onto which we can project our own fears and concerns. Laura Ford, Days of Judgement, Cat 1’, bronze, 2012

For the Orangery, Laura Ford has made a series of sculptures which look like children wearing penguin costumes; in fact Ford describes such works as sculptures dressed as people who are dressed as animals. Whilst Ford’s sculptures can initially appear comical and cute, they have a sense of the absurd and allusions to more serious, ominous and sometimes unsettling subject matter. With the penguins, her focus is on our often confused and divergent ideas about global warming and the fear that paradise may have already been lost. With the installations at Roche Court, there is a sense in which the cares of the world are so worrisome that transformation into melodrama may be all we can do. As Mark Gisbourne has said of her work ‘Comedy does not necessarily improve the world but makes it more tolerable’.

Laura Ford studied at Bath Academy of Art from 1978–82 which included a term at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. She was included in in 1983 before attending Chelsea School of Art and the sculpture show at the Hayward and while she was still at Chelsea. She has work in major collections around the world including ; National Museums and Galleries of Wales; Museum of Modern Art, University of Iowa; the Arts Council, Contemporary Art Society; The Government Collection, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Jupiter Artland and the Frederik Meijer Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has shown in group and solo exhibitions around the world, including two previous occasions at Roche Court; her ‘Bird’ is currently sited in the Sculpture Park.

PRESS PREVIEW: Saturday 24 November 2012. Free bus from London departing Tate Britain, Millbank at 10 a.m. and leaving Roche Court at 3 p.m. Seats are limited. Please contact the New Art Centre to reserve a place. For further information about the exhibition and for images, please contact Stephen Feeke on 01980 862244 or [email protected].