OSC: Making Work Here - Making Here Work with Laura Eldret

OSC: Making Work Here - Making Here Work with Laura Eldret

Weds 3rd July, 6pm-8pm

Pay What You Can: £7.50-£10

Join artist Laura Eldret in this OSC talk - discussing accessible, DIY approaches to making site-specific work, exploring connections between people, space and place.

Exploring art practice in Dorset? Keen to find ways to make work centred around our surroundings and the people that inhabit them?

Laura will share different practical and conceptual strategies to making artwork outside of the conventional gallery and studio spaces, drawing from examples within her practice and her New Forest community interest company ‘More Than Ponies’.

From working with Zapotec weavers in Mexico to ancient woodlands in the New Forest, Laura will reflect on her experience in making work that holds an interrelationship with the location, and the people within it.

The talk will focus on accessible, DIY, low budget approaches. Together, we will identify local sites of interest here in Dorset, and discuss various ways to make work. The talk will involve some light participation and conversations with room to ask questions.

About the artist

Laura Eldret is a Dorset based artist, researcher and organiser. Her installations, posters, drawings, textiles, videos and events have been exhibited internationally in major galleries worldwide. She has been awarded commissions by major art institutions and undertaken extensive projects and residencies, from England to Argentina. Laura has organised numerous exhibitions, events and conferences. She is founding director of More Than Ponies, an occasional artist-led programme of contemporary art for/about the New Forest and beyond. She was co-founder/director of CollectingLiveArt (2007-10) and was an Associate Artist on ‘Schools of Tomorrow’ at Nottingham Contemporary (2019–23). Laura is an associate lecturer at Arts University Bournemouth and she has been a guest artist at numerous other universities. In 2023 she was awarded a CATE studentship by UWE Bristol to carry out a PhD (2023–26) titled Commoning forms & practices: Productive intersections of socially engaged art, ruralities and social ecology. She is a trained permaculturist and play worker.

Laura is interested in the commonalities that bring diverse groups of people together and the productive tensions of social encounters. Drawing on methodologies of ethnography, sociology and ecology, she explores ways to affirm the value of conversation and social encounters across species. Her art and research explores how commoning can be a creative social collective practice that creates new forms of environmental care and sustainable exchanges between human and non-human ecosystems. She is concerned with establishing new values of engagement, ruralities, collective imaginations and artistic exchange that foster wellbeing, resilience, and sustainable ways of being in a time of climate emergency.

IMAGE CREDIT: Laura Eldret, Hey! 2014. Site specific performance. Photographer: Dan Weill

About OSC

Open School Creative is a collaboration between BEAF Arts Co and TOSH (The Old School House) to support our community of artists and their artistic development at all stages of their career. OSC events and workshops are for artists interested in collaboration, skills development, community and networking.

Getting to us at TOSH

If you are coming by foot or by bus, take the M2 bus and get off near Boscanova if coming from Southbourne, or the stop after Aldi if coming from Poole and Bournemouth. If you are coming by car we would recommend parking in the sovereign centre car park.

Pokesdown for Boscombe train station is a 15 minute walk from TOSH along Christchurch Road.

TOSH has accessible toilets and kitchen facilities. If you have any access needs you would like to let us know about, please feel free to email us: [email protected]

Host or Publisher TOSH