Residency: Laura Cooper

Laura Cooper is a UK based artist who makes work in performance, installation, drawing and moving image. Her practice probes the un-knowableness of other people and beings. Laura Cooper’s residency ‘ Capture and Embrace’ will experiment with the installation of artworks made during her practice-based PhD research.

The project is titled Grid, Net, Snare, Screen: Translating Interspecies Worlds in Artist Moving Image , it investigates how artist moving-image can engage interspecies relationships through modes of visual capture as well as ones of embrace. The projects include The Future is Soft which explores care and control in human-horse relationships focusing on horse whispering in the video Lessons in Leadership (2022) and the herding of wild welsh mountain ponies in the film The Gathering (2023). The project The Sun’s Tongue (2023)documents a yearlong collaboration with Birmingham bees and their beekeeper, to create a pollen colour chart using 16mm plant-based film.

Cooper in collaboration with the beekeeper and the Electron Microscopy (FEM) Lab at Birmingham university, created a pollen colour chart specific to these bees to establish the plant diversity of the city. Lessons in Leadership , Single Channel HD Video (13:40min) 2022 https://lauracooper.co.uk/lessons-in-leadership/ The Gathering , HD Single Channel Video, 2023 (23:22mins) https://vimeo.com/lauracooper/thegathering The Sun’s Tongue , 16mm Film multi-screen Installation, 2023 (8:55mins) https://vimeo.com/lauracooper/thesunstongue Digital pollen colour chart - https://vimeo.com/lauracooper/pollencolourchart?share=copy Mountain Whale, Laura Cooper. HD video and 16mm film (forthcoming) 2026.