Open Your Palm, Feel The Dust Settling There - Laura Grace Ford

In this work, Ford reconnects with the counter-narratives of Latimer Road by walking with a personal network of squatters, activists and soundsystems, as well as friends made during a decade of public sector work in the area. In 2005, Ford captured the affective currents of the Latimer Road area in her zine Savage Messiah where she connected with flashpoints of counter-cultural intensity.

The new work is both a lament and the channelling of an incendiary pulse, it is a retracing of steps, a map of warnings left unheeded.

Ford lives in a social housing block where concerns persist about the safety of cladding. Post-Grenfell, narratives were imposed and voices were excluded. Drifts through living rooms, abandoned buildings, and back rooms of pubs allow stories to proliferate from a network of hidden interiors; walking becomes a political strategy, a way of engaging with the collective intensities held in the fabric of a place.

From this process of tuning into these collective channels, Grenfell Tower emerges as a dominant thread in the spatial narratives uncovered on these walks. This series is a mapping of the repercussions and tremors radiating from this moment; most audible in the nomadic and transient zones, Wormwood Scrubs, Hammersmith Hospital, the spaces underneath the Westway.

BIOG

Laura Grace Ford 

London based artist and writer concerned with spatial narratives, contested space, architecture, fiction and memory (formerly Laura Oldfield Ford). Author of the much lauded zine Savage Messiah, her work is a psychogeographic mapping of de-industrialised zones and the new forms of socio-political discourse that arise there. In a series of texts, collages, paintings, audio works and installations she discusses the phenomena of gentrification and migration by drawing on the experience of displacement in cities subsumed by a finance-capital matrix. Central to her practice is the dérive, a process of mapping the psychic contours of the city. Her work returns to a deep involvement in subcultural scenes and protest movements and is an intense scrutiny of new urban terrain, nationalism and class.