The Shapes Game: its hard to take your eyes off it.

Two Person Exhibition.
Laura White and Peter Fillingham.
Carter Presents, London.

Peter Fillingham and Laura White use constructivist anarcho-punk aesthetics employing reconstructive surgery to our post industrial urban detritus.
Rebuilding intimate environments in a recyclical continuum, their intimate enquiries within the detached disposability of 21st century consumerism is as prevalent today in 2012 as it was intimated by Duchamp as he began work on the Large Glass in 1912 with the disposability of his Bachelors in a newly mechanised world.
Both Fillingham and White are magpies and hoarders mining their own respective localities as did Rauschenberg in New York in the 1960’s finding all the source material to use in his art within a block of his studio.

Exploring the language of sculpture Laura White uses a range of materials from everyday objects to constructed matter. Interested in a relationship and negotiation with the ‘stuff’ of the world, from the readymade to the handmade, cheap reproduced goods to church relics, playing with ideas of value, profile, association and meaning of individual and collections of objects. The works make both use of and referral to categories of objects, occupying a fluid space, on one hand demanding critical discourse, and on the other its own ambiguous and intuitive logic.

"The works I have made for the show locate themselves within a historical context and particular sculptural languages, such as to classicism and carved marble busts, the modernist abstract sculptures of Hepworth and Gabo, to ornate symbolic religious objects/relics. Relationships are set up and questions are provoked around value and taste through my works plasticized materiality and relation to current consumer culture. It is the trail of pastiche and replica objects in the aftermath of valued objects and sculptures that I negotiate my relationship to both. A category of objects I am currently working with, are the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth, where I am making pieces that parallel some of he intentions, such as to create simplified and reductive abstract forms, but as one looking back through art history and a current commoditized market of replica Hepworth type shapes and forms that appear in all kinds of retail outlets, from garden centers to craft shops, in the form of vases and ornaments etc. It is important for me to treat the everyday object with a regard to its production and authorship, as even the cheapest item from a pound shop has been designed by someone."