Artist 174
Allen Laing
Sculptural Inventions
Wood Work
Allen Laing is a South African artist who creates highly crafted artistic 'inventions' that perform interesting tasks. Laing specialises in mixed media sculptures with machine aesthetic.
His interactive artworks made from everyday objects function as a new means to execute menial tasks, such as listening, seeing, smoking and taking a leak. His works explore the loss of culture and ritual in our mass produced consumerist society.
Laing's sculptures often features everyday objects that are made for human interaction such as furniture and wood into funny wearables. He creates works based on his own personal viewpoint often using his own body as the 'mould' for his artworks to tell of his own experiences. For example, he blends bronze casts of the back of his leg, with worn chair legs and found wood to create a strange-looking mask.
He creates artworks that play with everyday frustrations. He explores ways in which we can respond to the daily struggles we face. Through a ritual of construction and reconstruction, he often builds, breaks apart, reassembles and reworks his sculptures until they are intuitively completed.
In his own words:
“I am at my happiest, and most in my element as artist, when I am performing with my artworks. For me performance runs through everything that I do in my studio when I am all alone, in the gallery when the public see my art, and out in the world when I perform with my art objects. I feel that as a post-post-modern, web 2.0 Westerner living in a globalised Capitalist state, I have lost a sense of culture, metaphysics and ritual in my daily life and communities, and my art performances entail my return to meaningful actions in my life.”
Sources Consulted:
https://www.art.co.za/…/allen-laing-creates-mixed-media-scu…
https://www.allenlaing.com/performances-1
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