Laura Slater

Laura’s images and designs often take inspiration from organic forms, and from there lean heavily into the abstract or semi-abstract, a form she sees as creating space for intuition and interpretation. For instance, in Laura’s Patrons Projects series she was invited to create images that would represent a series of single-hopped beers. 

“I was trying to capture flavour,” she begins. “So I thought, what would that look like in terms of shape or colour, or how we might experience that visually? Then I tuned into the places the hops had come from, and just started making very immediate connections between things. I think one of the beers had hops from Idaho, and I really love the B-52s, who’ve got a song called Private Idaho. So I looked at their videos, and then looked at the film My Own Private Idaho, and just sort of built my own mixing pot of all that stuff. Because the brief was so open, it was a chance for me to bring together different reference points and make more random connections. I think with Northern Monk’s approach to creativity, and how open their audience is as well, working with them has been a really, really good experience.” 

As much as she enjoyed using a can as her canvas, the material onto which Laura prints her designs remains a core part of her identity as an artist. “​​I think that textiles are sometimes a more tangible way for people to access art; they might not buy a painting, but they might buy something that they see as being more functional. I think my work has always been about that, again, maybe because of how I've been influenced. But you know, how does your actual living space echo the type of person you are, or what do the things that you choose to wear say about you? Textiles are our lives in collage in a way, so on the whole I work in soft furnishings. We've done some hangings, and then there's some limited edition prints as well, for those that might want things on their wall.”

Over the years, her commitment to this ethos has attracted an impressive range of collaborators, ranging in size from Roake Studio – a sustainable fashion brand, based on the Isle of Man – to John Lewis and IKEA. However, the project that Laura is most proud of is one that’s yet to be released. This summer ‘Kibbo’ will join the five other collections in Laura’s oeuvre, and engage with the artist's own life in a new way. 

“It's been quite a long time in the making, because I have a little girl who's three, so it's been a bit of a roller coaster getting work out the last few years,” she says. “That said, she’s made me think about what it means to have things in your home, and how it influences your family and their creativity as they're growing as people in their own right. So, I've been looking a lot at my past creativity in this project, and then thinking about the future and how that might influence other people. So some of the designs in this collection developed from me getting out my childhood school books and looking at my past drawings, and all the colours I was using and marks I was making. I found so many crazy little connections, like even in my handwriting now there’s evidence of how I was writing when I was five. It's been quite strange to look back, really.”

‘Kibbo’, refers to The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a camping, hiking and handicraft group, based in England in the 1920s, with utopian ideals and ambitions to bring about world peace through health, crafts, and social equality. Laura’s new collection will be available to view and purchase from August 2025.