"Laird shows a rare and deft calligraphic hand in the cutting and fitting together of innumerable small pieces of wood. The patina and texture of up-cycled wood fragments imbues each unique artwork with a strange familiarity."
DN Pettipas, Vancouver
Artist Statement:
I was born in 1944 in Glasgow, where my earliest influences were the applied arts, architecture, interiors and public art. These enthusiasms fused in formal training in display and set design. I arrived in Montreal in 1965 where I was influenced by Francois Dallegret and Armand Vaillancourt. I became a freelance exhibition and display artist, and worked at the World's Fair, Expo'67. Since then I have lived and worked at the interface between fine art and the applied arts. After living and working for 20 years in Victoria's Chinatown, I moved to Port Alberni in 1991. I was drawn less by the natural beauty of the setting than to the scale of the studio/workspace I could afford there. I could work intimately. The space I found was 20,000 square feet on three floors, built in 1928 of first-growth Douglas Fir. Although the building was in a state of neglect and decay, the material it was built from had retained its integrity. I found inspiration in the wood and its readiness. I dismantled parts of the building and used the wood to produce furniture. Over time, the local landscapes and the sagging geometries in the building became suggestive to me. I was challenged to preserve the dignity of the wood and started to explore my sense of the material. I began to assemble pieces of wood into abstract and suggestive compositions, discovering a ‘resonance of the familiar’ through the manipulation of very basic geometries. I moved to Cowichan Station in 2008 and began to work with an art photographer and printmaker to develop high definition digital images.
Artist's Website: www.lairdcampbell.com
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