Sandy Laing
MA (RCA) Painter & Illustrator - Professor Shih Chien University, Taipei, Taiwain
Recent exhibition:
November 4 - 17th, 2022
Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution, London, N6 6BS, UK
Sandy Laing, Flying Flags Q, 2021, arcylic and mixed media on canvas, 1215 x 1533mm
Sandy Laing, Alert, 2019, oil pastel, ink pen and mixed media on paper, 133 x 210mm
Sandy Laing, Next Flight, 1978, ink drawing and paper collage, 167 x 170mm
Sandy Laing, Newlyn (summer), 1983, oil pastel on paper, 135 x 115mm
Sandy Laing, Conversations 2 with Brooke, 2009, ink pen, acrylic and mixed media on card, 240 x 182mm
Sandy Laing, The Cowboy, 1971, acrylic paint on canvas, 1253 x 1253mm, Duncan of Jordanstone College, University of Dundee Museum Collection
Sandy Laing, Breakfast on Mars, 2021, acrylic paint and mixed media on canvas, 1215 x 1533mm
Sandy Laing, Interior, 1977, acrylic paint on card, 346 x 159mm
Sandy Laing, Soft, 2020, acrylic paint and mixed media on card, 343 x 383mm
Sandy Laing, The tide going out on Trump, 2021, acrylic paint and mixed media on canvas, 1215 x 1533mm
Sandy Laing, Headland (summer), 1983, oil pastels on paper, 103 x 82mm
Sandy Laing, Shoulder arms, 2013, colour pencil and mixed media on paper, 220 x 325mm
Sandy Laing, Sandy Lands, 1979, charcoal and mixed media on card, 360 x 360mm
Sandy Laing, Family pet mine sweepers, 2021 acrylic paint and mixed media on canvas, 1215 x 1533mm
Sandy Laing, The fox dreams of the rabbit, ink pen, 1992, acrylic paint and mixed media on card, 237 x 237mm
Sandy Laing, Peng Hu drama, 2011, acrylic paint and mixed media on canvas, 800 x 800mm
Sandy Laing, Air Sea Rescue, 2011, acrylic paint and mixed media on canvas, 800 x 800mm
Sandy Laing, Triptych (Self-Portrait), 1970, acrylic paint on card, 260 x 183mm
Sandy Laing, Vietnam & me, 2010, acrylic paint, pencil, ink pen and mixed media on card, 348 x 217mm
Sandy Laing, Miss Kitty airline, 2010, ink pen and mixed media on canvas, 240 x 330mm
Sandy Laing, 8 hours away, 1978, ink drawing and paper collage, 180 x 160mm
Sandy Laing, Bread, 2020, acrylic paint, oil pastel, pencil and mixed media on paper, 327 x 280mm
Sandy Laing, Children at her feat, 2016, acrylic paint on card, 1189 x 1682mm
Sandy Laing, Toucan (Self-Portrait), 1970, acrylic paint on card, 108 x 320mm
Sandy Laing, Maureen (Self-Portrait), 1970, acrylic paint on canvas, 1010 x 700mm
Sandy Laing, 23 to 2, 2018, pencil, acrylic paint and mixed media on card, 270 x 385mm
Sandy Laing, Going to see a man about a dog, 1987, acrylic paint and mixed media on paper, 1189 x 1682mm
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For all of Sandy’s fascination for and strength in visual literacy, it is not mirrored in self promotion.
The recent HLSI show focused on unseen work created in the last 3 years.
The post war clash of high and low culture represents a creative nucleus of Sandy’s thinking, distilled in the spectre of the US model of television arriving in the UK, with the first commercially sponsored station (ITV) set against the BCC’s moral mandate.
Growing up in a working class family in a provincial town in 1950s Scotland, Sandy explains you were aware of cultural divides and deep-rooted standards. Not unlike the rise of the internet, television and new media, offered a reward of the global world in all its strangeness, uncertainty and compulsiveness. Much work includes the use of collage and found objects that allow for a visual narrative of polarities, of refined and popular culture references, of the essential and of the, at first sight, insignificant.
More recent pieces examine’s shadowy recollections, using uncertain distant thoughts and allowing for the currency of visual play, and contemporary experience, to take hold and into them breathe life. For “so long as remembrance continues to exist, it is useless to set it down in writing or otherwise fix it in the memory”
- Maurice Halbwachs.
Works explore the contingencies, sleight of hand and also the partiality of seeing and the uncertainty of our recall. Images and objects from mass culture are press-ganged into low relief still lives and assemblages that try to fix our interior self with the wider world. Attempting to make sense of past events is to acknowledge memories illusionary concreteness, their reach and the contextual reappraisal that time and further events have brought. Can we trust memory if we affect a distancing each time from the original experience? A more hopeful view is that we are inferring what is to come from what is here rather than lapsing into reveries of the past.
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