Laura Põld

Laura Põld (1984) is an artist, who primarily creates aesthetic painted environments in conjunction with other mediums. Her works have emerged from incorporating textile, wood, found objects, ceramics and video. In her ouvre, she has been involved with creating a sense of place, combining the specific qualities of exhibition space and materially sensitive and narrative elements. She started making paintings and installations referring to a sense of home and living abroad in the 2010s.

One of her first exhibitions combining different mediums and representing landscapes was “Attempt to Stage a Landscape” in Tallinn Art Hall gallery (2013), which concentrated on peripheral areas – the thicketed or contaminated nature by humans. At her most extensive personal exhibition yet “Hundreds of Illusions Charted as Land” in Tartu Art Museum (2016), Põld opened the locus of points to her sense of world, which made possible for the viewers to simultaneously be in the forest of pine trees, on a jetty, on the edge of salty waters, around the hills, in a palace’s courtyard. Mixing together different time and room experiences from Estonia, Austria and Japan, she exhibited ceramics fired in the raku-technique, painting-sculptures, whose surfaces induced shifts in perspective and installations with marble-effect.

Among other things, Põld’s work is informed by cultural rituals. For example, she has focused on the customs of serving food, but also clothing in co-operation with Johna Hansen at the exhibition “Sense of Place” (2016) in Tallinn Art Hall gallery and in performance “Guest” (2017) at the exhibition “Structured Frustrations” in CC. art space in Isfahan. In her latest work, she focuses on the choice of materials and their historical context, implementing traditional handiwork techniques like (primitive) ceramics and embroidery, which interests her as a preservation of memory and experience.