Jeremy Laing creates incidental, non-hierarchical, narratives with unconventional, handmade, industrial, discarded, and under-appreciated material. Their immersive, affective environments respond to the constraints and possibilities of the deep, sensory pleasure of material—both clay and fiber—in the exploration of sensuousness and obliteration via spatial design.

Stockroom pulls from the hidden spaces of the gallery. It calls from the quiet resolve of the back room, the storage space, the depository. It recalls the space where one stores or ignores the archive (the lesser archive, the lower archive), the space that holds the administrative reserves, the reams of paper, the ink cartridges, the publications, the outdated marketing material. It is a hiding place. A dormant space. A forgotten space. It is a secondhand container for the everyday, for the things that are to be disregarded but not discarded, the things that are outdated but not obsolete. It is a transcendental space where objects emerge from sanctioned futility to be rearticulated in the now.

In preparing this exhibition, Jeremy used the Art Gallery of Burlington’s physical facilities as raw material. They push against, and yield to, the architectural constraints of the Perry Gallery—the lighting, ceiling tiles, stonework, and sliding glass doors—and draws from the material available in the AGB’s storage rooms. Here, they create a new stockroom, a sympathetic stockroom, a stockroom which is now a showroom, starring the previously mundane.

Stockroom draws attention to the oddities, the excess, the obsolete. It is a new container for how we might “see” and “use” these invisible items. The objects on display are choreographed as an epistle of and to craft. Assemblages of tapestries, vessels, and found objects become the tools for social architecture. The space is cut with screens and fabric shrouds, allowing us to peer into the storage room and view the things that lie waiting to be made useful again.

In their practice, Jeremy makes objects, spaces, and situations for embodiment and relation. Through the synthesis of craft with conceptual, performative, and social modes, their work explores the interrelation and transitional potential of people and things, spaces and surfaces, materials, and meanings—questioning the normative logics of who and what matters and is valued, or not.