Laurence Sturla
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1992
United Kingdom
GIANNI MANHATTAN
Laurence Sturla's (born 1991 in Swindon; lives and works in Vienna) visual language of his ceramic sculptures are part industrial, mechanical, part engine, part architecture. They draw heavily from Sturla’s upbringing in Swindon, once part of the thriving industrial revolution in England but now one of many English towns lined with empty factories. Sturla’s post-industrialist machines illustrate the fallacy between technological precision and our (in)ability to recall and visually digest space, function or logic.
Sturla's high fired ceramics, despite their vitrification, are still porous enough to allow a form of osmosis to happen as the ceramic works sit in salty water. This exchange renders the pieces as time based, or durational. Over the course of a few weeks, the works absorb the saline solution, and slowly sweat out salt crystals and develop salty strata, reminiscent of tide lines or artifices retrieved near a coastal dig.
These hand built, ceramic sections explore ideas of contaminated history, archeological re-imagining, post industrial re-assemblage. Sturla utilises material as a ...
Laurence Sturla (b. 1992 in Swindon, UK; lives and works in Vienna). Recent and upcoming shows include "nominated..." Vordemberge-Gildewart Award 2022, MUMOK, Vienna; Staying with the Trouble, Carbon12, Dubai (2022); Stone Dreams, Loggialoggialoggia, Munich; PK // K, Haus Wien, Vienna; Drawings, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2021); NOI, Museion, Bolzano (2019). Sturla teaches ceramics at the Kunstuniversität Linz.