In Light on Time, Laura Aldridge reminds us that meaning is created through linkages and associations. She deftly integrates a politics of care, community, and sensory experience into her new series of wall-bound sculptures presented by Kendall Koppe, Glasgow at Margot Same, New York. Fascinated by the instrumentalization of everyday material, and commemorating its qualities and origins, in a kind of costuming of the everyday, her works look anew at common functional objects, and make us feel at once distant from them and see them more closely. There's a sense of invitation and suspended narrative-each work offers a sentence, and asks the viewer to pick up the story.
Aldridge's sculptural language integrates ceramic, fabric, glass, and found objects into dynamic hybrids-objects that refuse categorization even as they nod to function. Mounted along the gallery walls, a series of lights combines ceramic interiors with encircling textiles in shifting configurations. The sculptures' lusciously glazed ceramic centers bear the energetic traces of having been molded, squeezed, and pulled, resulting in an undulating, textural sensuousness. This is heightened by light emitted from various bulbs, which brings the volume and depth of these puzzling clay abstractions into relief. Framed by fabric, the wall-bound works suggest metaphoric faces, each tethered to an extension cord that trails downward-reinforcing a sense of grounded intimacy and quiet animation. Yet in this topsy-turvy world, the sculptures might just as easily represent pockets turned inside out, following Aldridge's interest in offering ingress into spaces and corners that don't quite correspond to human scale, and in making the invisible visible.
Central to the conception of this exhibition was Aldridge's encounter with a ceramic figurine. She first came across this object in the Paisley Museum and Art Galleries' collection-a Victorian-era antique, its rigid, girdled form, made unique by the handmade addition of an enormous, padded skirt. The skirt appeared functional due to an imprint in the fabric but its function remains unknown. This hybrid figure became a key reference point for her work, inspiring a sculptural language that, as seen in the lights, does not separate artworks from the conditions of their material origin. It also speaks to the household as a site where the dislocation of the art object from the realm of the mundane can be bridged. Her work is not a copying of objects; she incorporates the language of functional associations into a new lexicon of physical reality.
This new series of light works and wedges advances ideas first explored in Aldridge's 2024 exhibition LAWNMOWER at Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh, where both the light sculptures debuted, and where she created a commission composed of oversized ceramic snail shells delicately balanced in a column, held in place with large wedge forms. These improvised supports embody multiple readings, including bringing into focus the quiet work of holding things in place. In her studio, these wedges shed their purely functional role to become autonomous sculptural elements, mounted on walls or positioned under objects, taking on ambiguous, almost animate qualities. For this exhibition, the wedges become the hands of a clock, moving in a way that does not suggest mechanical time, but a psychological and melted-down time, paired with glass objects and forms to create a sophisticated sequence of events. They are raw experience, the germ and seed of the present, which is always the process of finding equilibrium. Here, that search is made literal through a balance between mediums.
Social living and a political philosophy of community are integral to Aldridge's practice. Her studio is an experiment in alternative communal work that she co-founded, called Sculpture House Collective: a Victorian home where bedrooms have been converted into studios, with shared kilns, lush flower gardens, and a rotating group of friends, students, collaborators, and peers. She draws inspiration from non-traditional models of studio tenancy and collective resource-sharing. Throughout Light on Time, the heightened vitality of Aldridge's practice insists on the qualities that underscore the inseparability of her work and life. Familiar materials are given new roles, but this subtle estrangement invites not nostalgia, but a newfound attentiveness.
- Anna Yates, 2025
Laura Aldridge (b. 1978) lives in Glasgow and works in Paisley, Scotland. She is a founding member of the Sculpture House Collective, Paisley. Light on Time is Aldridge's third solo exhibition with the gallery. Embodying a spirit of exchange and collaboration while expanding the dialogue between galleries and artists, the exhibition takes place at Margot Samel, New York.
Recent solo exhibitions include: LAWNMOWER, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2024); sumVIGOUR, Cample Line, Cample (2021); #fromKStoyou, Kunsthalle Stavanger, Norway (2020 -2021); Indirect Sunlight - Laura Aldridge and James Rigler, New Gallery, London, (2018); Plant Scenery of the World, Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2017); Go Woman Go!, British Council in Nigeria Season, Abuja, Nigeria (2016); Inside All My Activities, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2016); One to another, one-to-one, Passerelle, Centre d'art contemporain, Brest (2015); California wow!, Tramway, Glasgow (2015); Laura Aldridge, Studio Voltaire, London (2011).
Selected group exhibitions include: Human Threads, Tramway, Glasgow (2022); The Outside is Inside Everything We Make, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2021); I am a Dependent Object, Biennale of Contemporary Art Brno, The Brno House of Art, Brno (2019); Perceptions, National Gallery of Kosovo, Museum Contemporary Art Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Museum of Contemporary Art, Macedonia (2018-2019); Things That Soak You, Kate MacGarry, London (2017); Diding - An interior that Remains Exterior, Kunstlerhaus, Graz (2015).
Her works are held in the public collections of Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh and The British Council Collection, England.
