Installation view of ‘Your Artist’ 2007
Laura Pawela – Your Artist
5th October – 11th November 2007
The first UK solo exhibition of work by multimedia artist Laura Pawela.
Laura Pawela – Your Artist was Pawela’s first UK solo exhibition. Born in 1977 in Poland, where she lives and works, her practice ranges from video performance to painting, and demonstrates a series of personal concerns about technology, identity, art making and ‘reality TV’.
The main installation was a new version of her Wykrój Mojego Ciala, 2002 (trans. ‘My Body Pattern’). This version, ‘My Body Pattern’ (2007) made exclusively for the gallery, was an interactive installation in which visitors may sew sections of a life size Laura Pawela nude. ‘My Body Pattern’ suggests a multitude of issues surrounding women in art and craft: from the female body as the traditional subject of sculpture and painting, via the female stereotype of both seamstress and doll, to the use of fashion to either disguise or accentuate the female form.
The exhibition also featured ‘Train Your Artist’ (2004), an interactive computer game. Visitors interact with a virtual Laura Pawela, instructing her to work, sleep, exhibit and play in the style of the popular Tamagotchi virtual pet. Train Your Artist represents the pressures and artistic commitments Pawela experiences as a contemporary artist in Poland. An online version of the game is available at laurapawela.com.
Pawela graduated in 2004 from the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw and was the recipient of a scholarship granted by the Polish Minister of Culture. In 2006 her video ‘My Talent Insurance’ appeared in the exhibition ‘You Can’t Come Closer, winner of the Gallery Prize at the ViennaFair 06, which went on tour to Cell Project Space in London. In 2005 Pawela participated in [prologue] new feminism/new europe at the Cornerhouse gallery in Manchester, an exhibition examining the complex social, economic and cultural position of women in the new Europe. She has had previous solo exhibitions in France and Poland, most recently at the Gallery of New Media, Gorzów Wielkopolski, in 2007.
Laura Pawela – Your Artist was curated by Pawel Kaminski and supported by the Arts Council England, the Polish Cultural Institute and GO. We would also like to thank the London College of Fashion for their assistance in realising the exhibition.
