Laura Oldfield Ford

Early life

Oldfield Ford grew up in Halifax, West Yorkshire in a community hit by the decline of the textile industry. In Leeds and later in London, she became involved in the punk, rave and squatting scenes and produced zines and posters influenced by Raymond Pettibon, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage. She took her Bachelor of Arts at the Slade Art School and her Master of Arts at the Royal College of Art (RCA). At the RCA's graduation show in 2007 she exhibited a four-section painting depicting herself in each panel as a heroine resembling Lara Croft, against a backdrop of urban chaos.

Savage Messiah

Savage Messiah, which takes its name from H. S. Ede's biography of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, was self-published from 2005 to 2009. Each issue focuses on a different London postcode. Savage Messiah uses the Situationist technique of the dérive: "urban drifts", or walks, during which Oldfield Ford collected images which were then placed alongside both original and found texts, with the purpose of describing places, people and events. In 2008 Owen Hatherley named Savage Messiah 10: Abandoned London as one of his "books of the year", describing it as "an oneiric vision of a depopulated, post-catastrophe capital, pieced together from snatched conversations and reminiscences, set in a landscape of the labyrinthine ruins of 1960s architecture and today's negative-equity banlieue."

The entirety of Savage Messiah was published in book form by Verso Books in September 2011. Reviewing the book for The Guardian, Iain Sinclair commented: "Collided into a great block, the catalogue of urban rambles takes on a new identity as a fractured novel of the city" and praised Oldfield Ford's "authentic gifts as a recorder and mapper of terrain." Summing up Savage Messiah, Sinclair wrote: "In the end, it's about walking as a way of writing, recomposing London by experiencing its secret signs and obstacles." In his review for Eye, Rick Poynor praised her "acutely observant" writing and "assertively linear style of drawing"; concluding, he described the work as "graphic literature of great urgency."

Hari Kunzru listed the Verso publication as a "book of the year" for 2011 and described it as "a wake-up call to anyone who can only see modern cities through the lens of gentrification." In a 2013 review for the American Book Review, Sukhdev Sandhu described the Verso publication as an example of "invisible literature" and "avant-pulp psychogeography" able "to rekindle erased histories of popular dissent from the 1970s to the 1990s", and one relevant to "a new and possibly endless age of austerity".

Exhibitions

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. Oldfield Ford was one of three artists whose work was exhibited as part of Slump City at SPACE in London in June 2009. Another exhibition, Britannia 2013–1981 ran in Hatfield from November 2009 until January 2010.

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

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

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

Themes and practice

Skye Sherwin of The Guardian writes that Oldfield 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." These include the East End of London and the new towns of Harlow, Hatfield and Stevenage. Her work on the East End is critical of the 2012 Summer Olympics, held in London, and the associated development program, in particular the urban regeneration process surrounding the Olympic Park.

Her work also engages with architecture. In a 2009 interview Oldfield 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. 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".

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". Paul Gravett describes Oldfield 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".

Contemporary archaeologist James R. Dixon set Oldfield 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 Oldfield 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.

She describes her practise as centring on walks through London and the creation of "emotional maps". Oldfield 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."

Other work

A short story by Oldfield Ford entitled "Liebe and Romanze" was published in Punk Fiction: An Anthology of Short Stories Inspired by Punk, edited by Janine Bullman. Her work was also featured in Urban Constellations, a 2011 collection edited by Matthew Gandy.