7th Oct 2013 12:00pm-1:30pm
Sallis Benney Theatre
Laura H.Trevail graduated from the Theatre and Visual Arts Programme at the University of Brighton in 2003 and has been working as a contextual artist and writer ever since. She is founder of The Society of Wonders, associate artist of Scary Little Girls, theatre designer and visiting lecturer at East 15 Drama School, University of Essex, and also works annually backstage for Glastonbury Big Top to learn how aerialists make fear sparkly.
“My work is largely to listen to a place, a problem, a need or an idea, and to craft that information into an experience that is enjoyable, useful, and hopefully surprising. I choose materials, process, aesthetic and form to suit the context, whether that is vicious puppet cabaret in a nightclub, a gentle treasure-hunt in a windmill, or the conceptual focus of an O+I board meeting.
"I work both as a solo and collaborative practitioner. Collaborations include archival walks with Barbara Steveni, writing and directing for Scary Little Girls, dance with Stepback and Lady Inert, and a wide variety of projects as The Society of Wonders. Solo work includes installation, exhibition, participatory events, and various writing. In each case, I aim to make glancing work with long-term resonance – like the memory of a kind word, or the lasting shiveriness of a ghost story. Sometimes it's head stuff, sometimes heart, sometimes both. Always gut.
"I often employ patterns and strategies learned in one field to the process of making something in another. I am interested in cause and effect. I am interested in what we think we see, and how that makes us feel.”
Commissions include Closing The Museum Of Childhood and You Go On Without Me/The V&A, (London), Wayside Shrine, Eden Project (Cornwall), Jettisons of Bude, Wildworks (Cornwall), Various Gay Shames/Duckie, De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill on Sea), Rayleigh Mystery Hunt. Rochford District Council (UK), as well as The Ragroof Theatre (Brighton) and The Battersea Arts Centre (London). Her works have been shown at Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany), Shunt (London), The Royal National Theatre (London, UK), Camden Roundhouse (London), The Latitude Festival (Suffolk) and in a dining car at Didcot Railway Museum, an abandoned antique shop in Leigh-On-Sea, as well as I Am An Archive at the White Cube Bermondsey, The Tate Archive and the Serpentine Gallery (London).
