Espaliered Girl

This artwork featured in Tell it to the Trees (2009). 

Espaliered Girl is a hybrid being, part child and part tree, her arms reaching out to the side as if some imaginary ties were training and shaping her like a fruit tree. Blending with her environment and not demanding too much space, she seems cruelly tamed and trapped.

Laura Ford’s work is usually a mixture of humour, melancholy and darkness. Inspired by surrealism, she is interested in ambiguities and in the implications of looking and being looked at, which involve pleasure as well as possible threat and fear of invasion.

Standing guard near the entrance of the walled garden, Espaliered Girl might be warning us off, or enticing us into, a magical and macabre world of fairy tale.

Image: Laura Ford, Espaliered Girl, 2007. Jesmonite. Courtesy the artist and Houldsworth Gallery.

 

About the artist

Laura Ford

Laura Ford exhibited in Tell it to the Trees, Croft Castle, 2010.

Image: Laura Ford, Espaliered Girl, installation view, Tell it to the Trees, Croft Castle, 2010.