Creative Talk: Laura Kazaroff

This event is part of our Creative Talks series that feature practitioners/makers/artists who work in a variety of disciplines, media and forms across the creative arts, including: the visual arts, design, performance, craft-work, creative writing and more. The series aims to address questions about the nature of ‘creativity’ and ‘practice as research’, featuring speakers who will share their work, the processes they use, their influences, and their own experiences of professional practice. Sessions will reflect the disciplinary range of speakers and may feature presentations, performances, workshops etc. The aim is to create an open, multi-disciplinary space in which to introduce audiences (students and the public alike) to a wide range of creative practices that inspire new ideas about how to make new work.

For this Creative Talk we welcome Laura Kazaroff, artist, whose work is currently featuring in the New Contemporaries Exhibition in The Levinsky Gallery Saturday 28 September – Saturday 7 December 2024. This event will be a presentation as an insight into Laura's research, practice and processes. She will talk through the early stages of her works' development, and what inspires and motivates her practice. One of the main themes that her practice explores is 'the wellness industry’, particularly through the eyes of ‘pop-culture’, and its direct effects on the way we perceive our own mental health. Laura will be discussing this as well as the important role that repurposing objects plays in her practice and how this is significant to the themes she researches.

Laura Kazaroff (b.1993) is a London based artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2023 she graduated from the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, previously having completed a BA Fashion Design at the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism (FADU) at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Her practice is concerned with the ways in which happiness, especially in relation to mental health, becomes inevitably commodified. Through sculpture and installation, she explores the various ways in which this commodification permeates contemporary culture and makes its way into daily social interactions. Often, this is manifested in the overusing of certain terms and phrases until they completely lose their meaning.

In this context, repurposing found objects serves as a dual metaphor. These once- functional items have now been transformed into gimmicky, non-functional devices that playfully deceive and ultimately 'disappoint’ in their lack of function. Their sleek metallic surfaces, smooth curves, and vibrant screens invite closer interaction, only to reveal that the buttons don't work, and the handles are merely plungers.

Recent group shows include: ABG emerging: Collection 01 at Alice Black (2024), In between/ness: Women tales from Latin America at Somers Gallery (2024), Asphodel Meadows at Staffordshire St by Studio Chapple (2023) and Hall of mirrors for PLOP by Georgia Stephenson (2023).

Chair: Mary Costello, Associate Lecturer Art History, University of Plymouth

Image credit: Mike O'Malley

Host or Publisher The Arts Institute