Laila Majid
b. 1996, United Kingdom
Laila Majid’s work circles around pleasure, desire, concealment and the delayed act of the reveal. She explores how objects and their surfaces contain the traces of human desire. Since graduating with an MA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021 she has made sculptures and installations that often use the materials associated with the fetishwear scene, such as latex, as well as objects that deliberately resist the viewer’s gaze, utilising reflective materials to obscure her imagery. Film works return to the idea of the human gaze and the act of looking.
Majid’s use of latex in a number of her sculptural works ipoints to a focus on exteriority. The material, still largely associated with fetishwear despite its appearances in fashion, offers a smooth, frictionless surface that encases bodies and contours irregularities into a pristine finish. It acts as a second skin or a simulacra of skin, making individual bodies more abstracted, its shimmer and shine creating reflections from the surface of the viewer’s body, bouncing the gaze of the other back to them.
This foregrounding of exteriority might also be read into Majid’s use of high visibility reflective ink in wall-based works. The use of this material that is more commonly used on running and cycling clothes means that the image on the work is only viewable when the light catches it, or the viewer stands at a certain angle to it. The material’s usual function is to reflect headlights or streetlights and highlight the user, that is to raise the visibility of their exterior, shape and presence. This is both an assertive gesture (“look at me”) but also paradoxically a defensive gesture, acknowledging the vulnerability of the user in the face of more powerful and destructive forces.
This peculiar mix of insistence on exteriority and admission of vulnerability can also be read into Majid’s ‘Steam’ series. These works, made on mirrored dibond, show an image of the condensation on Majid’s bathroom mirror after a shower has steamed it up. There is frisson of an erotic charge - the steam on the mirror in a bathroom promises but does not deliver the reveal of a body but also a fragility that arises from capturing a moment that will shortly disappear.
It becomes clear that Majid’s insistent return to the surface of things and exteriority is deeply deliberately unstable, shot through with eroticism. Latex might be a second skin but its use in clothing is dependent on it being next to naked flesh. Its insistence on surface, on exteriority is dependent on a body beneath it that it can mould itself to. In other works surfaces are unstable; frosted acrylic screens are used as divisions between the viewer and partly seen objects behind them in a number of her installations. Concealment, self-pleasure and the act of the reveal to the other are in constant interplay in Majid’s work in a constant interplay of pleasure, desire and refusal.
Laila Majid (b. 1996) lives and works in London. She graduated from her MA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021, and additionally completed an MSt in Film Aesthetics at the University of Oxford.