Matilda Laird

Matilda Laird is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Her practice includes sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, video and digital drawing. Her generally large-scale architectural works address broad themes of consumerism and the manipulations of retail. With a focus on ideas of elevation and display, she appropriates a retail aesthetic as a means of critiquing retail aesthetics.

In a statement about her work Matilda says:

Shop windows and adverts play on desires through attractive colours and seductive materials. I am interested in this control that colours and materials can have, and in my own work aim to create a similar seduction. I take colour schemes from fashion house campaigns. However, paired with different forms and materials these colours can symbolise different things. This is where my work starts to look at the gratuitous boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and aesthetics. 

Romanticism is present in current language and aesthetics. In art, architecture, and film, it is making a resurgence (e.g. art from Tacita Dean, architecture from Herzog & de Meuron, and film from Wes Anderson). In adverts, this romantic trend is also apparent, as advertising companies often employ an artistic language, adding ‘prestige’ to mundane objects. This shows a linguistic and aesthetic link between the arts and advertising. I am interested in this connection, and how advertising companies capitalise on visual trends that are created/upheld by the arts.

This link is perfectly highlighted in the romantic language present in many contemporary fashion campaigns. For example, the slogans for Prada’s 2021 campaigns are, “What Utopia do you strive for?” and “Is future a romantic idea for you?” Compared to their 2001 campaign, “New Realism – Everyday life re-staged in exquisite detail,” Prada’s advertising rhetoric has been romanticised.

Throughout my work I look at ideas of the stage and the implications that these have on a space or individual. I address ‘the stage’ more broadly than just a mode for display; it is also a scene of action or an event. Cat-walks, award ceremonies and traditional theatre all generally operate from a platform, where attention and importance is directed. My work addresses the weighted status and presence of this elevated space.

I enjoy making work that evokes a strong and varied sense of symbolism. I find it interesting how specific arrangements of colours and materials can symbolise certain things, and even more interesting that subtle changes in arrangement can change the symbol altogether. For example, a length of light pink neoprene draped over some plywood could symbolise a fairy-tale wedding table, whereas that same fabric tautly attached to the wood could resemble a designer handbag. 

In my installation work I address the question of when sculpture starts and ends and how the work exists. Photographs allow me to pinpoint certain time frames of the installation; I often see my work as a continual piece of sculpture, bookended by photographs.

If you’d like to stay up to date with Matilda’s work you can follow her @matilda.laird.