Laura Põld

Laura Põld (1984) is an artist whose work deals with the history of materials and objects as well as the environment, exploring ways of organizing space and basic cross-species needs, such as security, habitat, and community. Põld’s installations seek a dialogue with their location and its historical and political context. Her works are created by combining textile, wood, found objects, ceramics, and video.

One of her first exhibitions to integrate different media and recreate the landscape was Attempts to Stage a Landscape(2013), which focused on peripheral areas – overgrown or human-damaged nature. In one of Laura Põld’s largest solo exhibitions, Hundreds of Illusions Charted as Land (2016), the artist opened up the veils of her poetic perception, allowing visitors to be simultaneously in a pine forest, on a dock, by salt water, in the mountains, and in a castle courtyard. Mixing different temporal and spatial experiences from Estonia, Austria, and Japan, she exhibited raku-fired ceramics, marble-effect installations, and painted sculptures whose patterned surfaces revealed shifts in perspective. In her later work, Põld has focused on the choice of materials and their historical context, using traditional craft techniques such as ceramics and embroidery, which are of interest to the artist as repositories of memory and experience.

Laura Põld’s exhibitions in recent years have focused mainly on the relationship between man and nature, and on environmental issues. As part of the Estonia 100 art project Artists in Collections (2018), Põld integrated an alternative environment into the permanent exhibition of the Kunda Cement Museum, examining the history of the town of Kunda, its manufacturing industry and its natural resources. She experimented with natural clay pottery techniques, creating monumental objects that incorporated both the town’s historical markers and found fossils. The desire to juxtapose man-made landscape elements with natural materials continued in the exhibition Common Threads, Polar Bear and Elephant with Andres Tolts (2022), which brought together two artists from different generations. It opened up the possibility of experiencing how art and art history exist in a non-linear and constantly overlapping time, interacting in different ways.

As part of the group exhibition Art in the Age of the Anthropocene at Kumu Art Museum (2023), which looked at human activities with a major impact on the environment such as: the oil shale industry, industrial agriculture, fishing, peat extraction, drainage of raised bogs and forestry. Põld collaborated with artist Lou Sheppard to create a video installation entitled Sweeping the Sea + Large Oak + Strange House. The installation explored the diverse life of quarries after the extraction of rocks and minerals, highlighting different geological periods and life forms. The piece featured an arrangement by Sander Saarmets, based on the folk song that gave the piece its title. The voices of the LGBT+ mixed choir Vikerlased invited the audience to think about the future of quarries and possible new forms of cohabitation.

Laura Põld has also participated in contemporary art fairs, for example, her solo exhibition Fibres in the Cave (2023) at Art Brussels, presented materials and forms found in caves, which form a living, interconnected whole. These motifs were expressed in Põld’s large tapestries as well as in her ceramic works. The tapestries carried the different textures of the quarries, creating visually varied surfaces and layered structures that reflected the complexity and depth of the natural caves. In ceramics, Põld used the shapes of natural rocks and minerals and integrated them into her sculptures, creating abstract landscapes and organic forms. At the viennacontemporary art fair, Laura Põld’s wall installation Ways of Being (2023) made of ceramics and bioplastics was exhibited. The work focused on the challenges facing humanity in an era of global crises. To address these questions, Põld created an installation space to reflect on possible solutions.