Sculptor Laura White’s studio visit began with her reading a short text describing her ongoing project which involves her undertaking short training courses in a range of specialist manual skills, not necessarily those associated with the skills of an artist, sculptor or maker. These included butchery, fish knife skills, brick laying and sushi making. This emphasis on the material qualities of things, stuff, tools and processes formed the basis of the discussions with each of the Associates offering some response to Laura’s prompt. The discussion included a consideration of whether this can only ever be in opposition to the contemporary relationship to making which is typically negotiated through, if not dominated by, a disembodied and remote digital process, or whether there are ways in which ideas from each apparent extreme might be brought into useful relation to one another.
