Folded Lines brings together the works of UK-based artists Laura Porter and Gabriela Giroletti with those of Malaysia-based artists Lee Mok Yee and Mark Tan, spanning 3D and 2D works including sculptures, reliefs, drawings, paintings, and prints. The body of work explores personal and universal interactions with urban environments, man-made materials, and architectural spaces through a process-driven approach to making. All four artists transform shape and form through simple gestures, exploring in-between spaces that feel both static and alive, organic and inanimate.

Gabriela’s work straddles the space between painting and object, refusing to be confined to the boundaries of the canvas. Through her build-up of layers and colour, her style is characterised by the gradual development of surfaces, which become a hazy field of both micro and macro sensibility, referencing the monumental sensation of being submerged within the landscape and the microscopic beauty that lays the foundation for the natural world.

Mok Yee explores the organic world through the lens of found and industrial woods. In the works he presents for this exhibition, he tears and layers cork wood—a heavily processed material used in manufacturing and construction—using low-tech processes and elements of chance, in an attempt to capture the natural form of the material, where it exists somewhere between the organic and the man-made. The investigation of material language is expanded upon by combining the cork wood with deconstructed furniture, thinking about how our bodies move and interact with objects and space.

Laura Porter also uses low-tech bodily processes to deconstruct and reconstruct material, cutting down used items of clothing into minuscule fibres and using organic substances that transform the textiles into rigid structures. Combining this ‘new material’ with distorted metal frameworks, she subverts the soft fabric into solid material, and the solid material into something seemingly unstable, challenging our material world and reimagining these forms as quasi-living entities. Thinking about how material consciousness becomes imbued within the fabric of spaces, Laura’s work explores how the body becomes a site of action, and a renewable energy source, whilst referring back to the manufacturing process of the garments themselves.

Similarly, Mark Tan is concerned with the spaces we inhabit and traverse, exploring the hidden and forgotten moments, the unseen spaces, and the corners in which our consciousness gets lost and found. Taking visual references from these built environments and urban spaces, Mark creates textured surfaces that constantly refer back to the tradition and processes of printmaking and drawing, where the hand of the artist is ever present.

Folded Lines explores the transformation of materials and forms, and the hand-made processes that are at the root of the artist’s explorations. Against the backdrop of an urbanised, digitised culture, Mok Yee, Mark, Laura and Gabriela choose a physical, slow approach to making, pushing the boundaries of their mediums whilst remaining grounded in the traditions of their craft.

Text by Laura Porter

Exhibition dates: 17 February – 10 March 2024
Opening reception: Sunday, 18 February from 3–7pm
Artist tour: Sunday, 18 February at 3pm

About the Artists

Gabriela Giroletti (b. 1982, Brazil) is a Brazilian painter currently living and working in London. In 2018, she received her MFA in Painting (distinction) from the UCL, Slade School of Fine Art, where she held a position as an Honorary Research Fellow from 2019-20. In 2015, Giroletti graduated with a BA in Fine Arts (first class) from the Middlesex University, London. In 2024, she will have solo presentations in Paris, Palm Beach, and São Paulo.

Laura Porter (b. 1991, England) is an artist and curator, having studied BA Fine Art at Middlesex University and MA Sculpture at University of the Arts London. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, commissioned by galleries, and shortlisted for awards. Laura is the founding director of Studio KIND. CIC, an artist-led gallery in Devon.

Lee Mok Yee (b. 1988, Klang, Malaysia) is a Malaysia visual artist currently based in Kuala Lumpur. He graduated with a Diploma from the Dasein Academy of Art and a Bacherlor’s in Fine Art from Middlesex University in London. Mok Yee has exhibited in Singapore, France, South Korea, UK and Germany, received awards such as the UOB Painting Award, and has undertaken residencies at Rimbun Dahan and in Arles, supported by the Institut Francaise.

Mark Tan (b. 1991, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist based in Kuala Lumpur. He received his BA in Drawing and Applied Arts from the University of West England. Mark is one of the recipients of the Khazanah Nasional Residency in 2022/23 and over the years he has exhibited both locally and internationally in Singapore, Indonesia, France, and the UK.