Savage Messiah

Later work

!! to work on further. Here cut and paste from Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Oldfield_Ford

Ford’s work subsequent to Savage Messiah tends to move beyond the zines’ focus on London and beyond the zine from, concerning other geographical spaces and adopting other forms including paintings and installations.^[38] Her work was also featured in Urban Constellations, a 2011 collection edited by Matthew Gandy.^[39] As of 2019 Ford was writing fiction and collaborating with the musician Jam City on work continuing the themes of the Savage Messiah project.^[2]

From January until March 2009, a collection of her work entitled London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins, including all ten issues of Savage Messiah, was featured in London’s Hales Gallery.^[22] Ford was one of three artists whose work was exhibited as part of Slump City at SPACE in London in June 2009.^[23] Another exhibition, Britannia 2013–1981 ran in Hatfield from November 2009 until January 2010.^[6]

In February 2011, Ford’s work was on display in Bristol as a part of Poster Sites, a project commissioned by Arnolfini.^[3] She created 11 posters based on dérives in the city; though Arnolfini produced a map and Ford led a walk between them, they were primarily left to be casually witnessed by the public.^[10] Also in 2011, her work was featured in Orbitecture, an exhibition at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool.^[3]

In 2012 her work was exhibited as part of There Is a Place… at The New Art Gallery in Walsall.^[24] Also in 2012, work by Ford inspired by El Raval and protests in Barcelona were featured in Desire Lines at the Espai Cultural Caja Madrid in Barcelona.^[25]

In 2014 Ford’s work was featured in Soft Estate at The Bluecoat in Liverpool.^[26] The same year, her work was included in Ruin Lust at the Tate Britain.^[27] Later that year a solo exhibition of paintings and collaged drawings entitled Seroxat, Smirnoff, THC ran at the Stanley Picker Gallery in Surbiton.^[28]

Her solo exhibition Chthonic Reverb ran at Grand Union Gallery in Birmingham in 2016. Featuring audio and visual work, the exhibition focuses on Birmingham, where Ford lived in the early 1990s, including Herbert Manzoni‘s impact on the city and the Big City Plan.^[29]

In 2017 Ford’s solo exhibition Alpha/Isis/Eden ran at The Showroom in London. The exhibition focused on the effects of urban regeneration in the neighbourhood surrounding the gallery near Edgware Road in central London, and included audio recordings of the area.^[1][30][31]

Themes and practice[edit]

Skye Sherwin of The Guardian writes that Ford’s work “focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed, which regeneration seeks to concrete over: city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise, with their Escher-like walkways and bleak ‘recreational’ open spaces.”^[3] These include the East End of London and the new towns of Harlow, Hatfield and Stevenage.^[6] Her work on the East End is critical of the 2012 Summer Olympics, held in London, and the associated development program,^[22] in particular the regeneration process surrounding the Olympic Park.^[23] Christopher Collier has argued that Ford’s work utilises “semi-fictionalised settings of dilapidated blue-collar and immigrant districts of a post-Thatcherite London increasingly ghettoised, defunded and threatened by the state.”^[32]

Her work also engages with architecture. In a 2009 interview Ford reiterated the centrality of a critique of urban regeneration, and expressed an interest in brutalist architecture (referring specifically to Broadwater Farm in Tottenham and Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar.^[33] Ford has argued that brutalism is significant due to “the collective ideals inherent in it: the rethinking and radical reshaping of public space, the idea of cities being conducive to an endless ‘derive‘, the postwar idea that everyone is entitled to a publicly owned house.”^[1] She also critiqued “an obsession with friendly looking architecture, curved lines, outgrowths of green roof tops, panels and balconies in Scandinavian wood or brightly coloured aluminium”, describing these trends as “playschool architecture”.^[33] In 2018, Ford noted that her recent work was concerned less with inner cities and more with suburbs and urban peripheries: “That’s mostly where you have to go now if you want to encounter the former intensity of zones 1 and 2 … It used to be the inner cities that were sacrificed, ruled by slum landlords, starved of investment and surrounded by circles of unreachable affluence. But in the past decade or so there has been an accelerated reversal of this process.”^[1]

In the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Andrew Harris wrote that London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins (2009) “attempts to reactivate more conflictual architectural, political and aesthetic strategies that have been largely erased by the widespread gentrification of London since the 1970s” and is an example of an intervention which offers “an important and neglected resource for complicating, disrupting and re-visioning understandings of urban change”.^[34] Paul Gravett describes Ford’s work as being fuelled by a longing for a past incarnation of the punk subculture and a “recovery of punk’s provocation and politicisation”.^[5]

Contemporary archaeologist James R. Dixon set Ford’s February 2011 Arnolfini exhibition against the April 2011 Bristol riot. Dixon saw in her work “the material conditions that can be identified as a contributing factors” in the riot, and noted that rather than being immediately apparent, those conditions are identified by Ford through the dérive technique and her use of found images. Dixon argues that, like the riot itself,

Oldfield Ford’s work exposes what is hidden by the veneer of respectability … [it shows] just how thin that veneer is, how beneath the fake harmony of consumerism and happy lives there is a “truth” of hardship, decay, and violence that will, on occasion, reveal itself. It is … observed not easily, but by durational engagement with places, both in the form of the drifts and “off-site” in the forming of the juxtapositions of images and text that most accurately represent the potential of a place to experience civil unrest.^[10]

She describes her practise as centring on walks through London and the creation of “emotional maps”.^[6] Ford has said “I regard my work as diaristic; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting. The need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace.”^[22] Discussing Alpha/Isis/Eden in 2018, she said “I walk around London to gauge what’s happening, to tune into the affective shifts. This is how I think about walking and memory, as a process of piecing fragments together to resurrect something, to stop them being erased, and to will something into being.”^[1] She also said, in the same interview:

While Ford’s work has been described as psychogeography, Mark Fisher suggested that it be understood instead in terms of Jacques Derrida‘s account of hauntology, in order to better understand the ways the urban spaces she depicts represent “ghosts” or political paths not taken.^[35] Christopher Collier, conversely, has proposed that Ford’s work be understood as both hauntology and psychogeography, and that such an approach allows a reappraisal of the politics of psychogeography.^[35] Collier argues that “Savage Messiah is psychogeographical in that it involves drifting through the city, exploring the effects of the environment upon behaviour and emotion”,^[36] but also draws on hauntology as a means of engaging “the failures of social democracy and post-war Modernist urban planning, but also … the collapse of the psychogeographic revival” of the 1990s.^[37]