Alastair Laas is an artist whose practice rebounds between industry and imagination. Drawing on two decades inside global media systems, he uses sculpture, performance, and critical fabulation to expose the tension between building culture and profiting from it. His work asks what remains of us when belief becomes engineered by commerce.
Idling Around A King (2022) DOOH
Guided by the belief that art can re-interrupt systems of dominance, Laas transforms overlooked spaces and discarded materials into speculative sites of renewal. His installations and interventions invite audiences to question the systems they live within and imagine alternatives.
His projects often engage public and institutional audiences outside traditional gallery settings through material storytelling, myth-making, and socially-engaged practice. Each work is rooted in research, connecting lived experience with anthropological inquiry to link global forces — such as extractivism, oil dependency, and cultural homogenisation — to their local consequences.
Laas' hybrid background in commercial design, corporate communication, and placemaking enables him to deliver complex, multi-stakeholder projects that bridge conceptual critique with high production values. This rare combination allows cultural institutions, philanthropic patrons, and corporate leaders to commission publicly resonant and strategically relevant works.
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Exhibitions include Taking Time, Flatland Projects, 2025; The Digital Quilt, Art In Flux at INDEXprojects 2020; Dear My Little Prince, KMCA, 2018+19; Aesthetica Art Prize 2019; (H)AKT—Art & Haktivism, Ugly Duck 2018; Overpr!nt, Le Centre de la Gravure, 2018; Metaphors & Spatiality, Sichuan University & Wuhouci Gallery, 2017-18; Studio Complex, Tate Modern, 2017-18.
Residencies include Arebyte Gallery, 2018, and Flatland Projects x De La Warr Pavilion, 2025. Awards and recognition include the David Ward International Award for Innovation, ArtConnect's ‘Artist to Watch’ (2022), Aesthetica Top 100 (2019), and shortlists for the Churchill Fellowship (2025), Artquest SEED Award, and Chiara Williams Solo Award.
Insight Context-specific design, creative direction & project development that encourages community and skills-sharing. Production and Direction for film, moving-image, editing, editorial, and digital design. Primarily for artists, arts organisations, lifestyle brands and charities in their events, marketing, network, and campaign development.
Clients Arnolfini Museum, Capa First Response, Phe Davies, Google, CeriHand, Gather & Gather, Ubisoft, Susannah Pal, Kemistry, Pret, Diageo, Atelier21, Red Bull, Mercedes, Coca-Cola, Sky, Salesforce, ITV, Ch4, Al Jazeera, Lejay Lagoute, Qatar Petroleum, Mohamed Harisani Architects, CIMA, BBC, Sybarite, HSBC, Heineken.
Detail documents for curators, collaborators and commissioners
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Alastair Laas creates sculptural installations and speculative infrastructures that interrogate extractive culture, bodily vulnerability, and the systemic erasure of suffering. Working with wood, clay, industrial materials, and the language of corporate aesthetics, he constructs material fictions that explore how trauma, memory, and consumption entangle within late capitalism.
A fictional corporate mythology runs throughout his work, staging avatars of exhaustion locked in cycles of performance. These figures expose how systems construct disposability and aestheticise damage.
Laas's practice evolved from years spent inside media systems that exhausted his body and ethics. His work considers how industrial and digital structures override our biological limits—how we build environments hostile to the very bodies meant to live in them. His projects act as sites of rupture, where the possibility of slowness, care, and ecological balance is reintroduced—not as utopia, but as necessity.
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Alastair Laas is a British artist (b.1982, Black Country, England).
Recent exhibitions and projects include Taking Time: Flatland Projects (Bexhill, UK, 2025), The Digital Quilt - Art In Flux: INDEXprojects (London, UK, 2020), Dear My Little Prince: Korean Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, S. Korea, 2018 & 2019), Aesthetica Art Prize: York Art Gallery (York, UK, 2019), (H)AKT - Art & Haktivism: Ugly Duck (London, UK), Mayfair Fringe Festival (London, UK, 2018), Overpr!nt: Le Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image Imprimée (Liège, Belgium, 2018), Metaphors & Spatiality: Sichuan University Fine Arts Institute (Chengdu), Wuhouci Gallery (Chengdu), and Studio Complex: Tate Modern (London, UK, 2017 & 2018). Commissioned works for clients such as Google, Arnolfini, Diageo, Mercedes-Benz, HRH The Queen, Sky, Coca-Cola, and Red Bull.
Studied at the Byam Shaw School of art (Central Saint Martins) under Louisa Minkin, Alex Landrum and Kate Love. Completed residencies with Arebyte Gallery in London (2018), was an Artist to Watch by ArtConnect (2022), and Top 100 Artist for the Aesthetica Art Prize (2019). David Ward International Award for Innovation recipient in 2018 and shortlisted for Best Moving Image at the Drum Awards (2015). Completed the De La Warr Pavilion x Flatland Studio Programme in 2025, and shortlisted for the Churchill Fellowship (2025), trustee position at Spike Island and the High Weald Public Art Commission. He was also a finalist for the Artquest SEED Award and the Solo Award at Chiara Williams Contemporary (2018). Laas is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London (2026).
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Alastair Laas creates sculptural installations and speculative infrastructures that interrogate extractive culture, bodily vulnerability, and the systemic erasure of suffering. Working with wood, clay, subcultural and industrial paraphernalia, and a language borrowed from corporate enterprise, he builds material fictions that explore how trauma, memory, and consumption intersect within late capitalist society.
His relationship to material is grounded in generational and embodied knowledge. Raised in an industrial heartland known as the Black Country to a family that straddled class lines, Laas spent his early years building luxury yachts, assembling functional equipment, cleaning industrial spaces, and servicing the needs of the affluent. These repetitive, output-focused environments embedded a physical understanding of how the body is worn down by systems engineered for productivity, not care.
Time spent visiting family in Indonesia exposed him to devotional craft traditions rooted in ritual and moderation. These opposing material legacies—industrial and sacred—continue to shape the emotional texture of his work, which seeks to understand what it means to live in systems that value neither the human body nor the planet it inhabits.
A confrontation with human fragility shaped his early outlook. Later, fifteen years inside media systems tasked with packaging war, collapse, and catastrophe as consumable content cemented that awareness into a structural wound. His work does not simply illustrate trauma; it is the cultural and psychological consequences of never being allowed to look away.
Drawing acts as a private reckoning. Sculpture renders what the body remembers, but language resists. Performance and installation become speculative sites where renewal is rehearsed without certainty. Beneath all this runs a corporate mythology, a theatre of exhausted avatars caught in cycles of performance. These figures are not symbols; they are symptoms.
Materials are chosen for what they've endured—sporting jerseys, branded packaging, frottaged signs, discarded objects of speed, risk, and commerce. These residues of coercion are relics; hypermodern waste made heavy, quiet, and human.
Laas's work often escapes the gallery, appearing on streets, in kiosks, or embedded into public infrastructure. These sites interrupt dominant consumption flows, spatial control, and corporate narrative. They function as invitations to pause, remember, and reimagine.
Underneath all this lies a central tension: our collective desire to shape and improve nature through invention, and the toll this intervention takes on our bodies and the Earth. Laas's work argues that while industrial culture promises safety, longevity, and speed, it delivers isolation, fragility, and disconnection. We must confront the possibility that adapting to a slower, more natural way of life may mean suffering more, or even dying sooner—but that adaptation is essential to sustaining the planet and preserving what it means to live well.
His work is not a lament, nor is it moral panic. It is an anatomy of damage, a quiet refusal to participate in systems of engineered forgetting, and a speculative rehearsal for how we might build differently. Laas's practice begins and ends with one core pursuit: to reclaim the human spirit in a world designed to suppress it.