About Gregor Laird
A couple of years after graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2001 with a degree in Graphic Design, Gregor Laird was perfecting and honing his craft, working on flyers, logos and leaflets. After a trip to New York, Laird returned to Edinburgh inspired and after a visit to Glasgow's infamous 'Abnormals Anonymous' club, was ready to shake Edinburgh up a bit.
He set up the club night 'Disko Bloodbath' in August 2004, preceded by a mildly controversial teaser campaign. The club night breathed fresh air into the otherwise generic music policy of the Edinburgh gay scene, offering electro, indie and punk to a crowd that had been spoon-fed house and chart pop for too many years. Laird used the venue like a gallery, projecting his artwork and graphics onto the walls. Unfortunately, Disko Bloodbath was a victim of its own success and hype and quickly became stale.
Laird quit and set up another club night with New Yorker Martin Belk who had produced legendary NYC glam night 'Squeezebox'. 'Heroes' was an occasional themed party, complete with go-go dancers and decor straight out of Andy Warhol's factory. Heroes gave Laird the opportunity to learn how to DJ a little better - his sets at Disko Bloodbath consisted of him pressing random buttons until the music started. Heroes did album launch parties for the likes of Garbage, Ladytron and Franz Ferdinand and asked bands to play live, something which hadn't been done in gay clubs in Edinburgh. Laird still DJs in various clubs when asked, and plays a heady mix of glamorous indie and electro pop. He has played at London's Club Mother****er and Glasgow's Utter Gutter.
At the beginning of 2006, Laird had begun to concentrate on his first love - art. A submission to the renowned Glasgay festival was accepted on the basis of one finished piece, "Red Riding Hood", which portrayed a modern and suggestive take on the old fairy tale, a young scally with a red tracksuit hoodie out cruising in a secluded forest setting. A man with a wolf mask on leers at him lasciviously, but Red doesn't seem to heed the (sexual) predator.
The rest of the show was completed during the Summer of 2006. The collected pictures that make up 'Lost in the Forest' use the suggestive power of the forest as both enchanting and naive, but also a potentially dangerous and dark place. Laird drew on his childhood years living in the country surrounded by miles of woods. These places always carry legends of local folklore and most of the Brothers Grimm stories (who were his favourite authors as a child) took place within 'enchanted forests' full of wild beasts and evil witches. Reading these stories back, Laird says "they carry psychological and on occasion, sexual connotations."
The illustrations, like most of Laird's other work were collages, combining elements of desktop bricolage alongside tactile production, incorporating feathers, spraypaint and texture into the Graphic Design-led aesthetic.
When the show opened in October, it was a success, being picked up by local and national press and practically selling out on the opening night. An architecture firm in Edinburgh read an interview with Laird in The List and commisioned him to provide a huge mural for a bar that was being re-designed in the trendy student area of Edinburgh. Thematically, this new work picks up where 'Lost in the Forest' finished and looks to the story of Adam and Eve and the fall of Paradise.
This artwork entitled 'Utopia' is set in a jungle made up of candy coloured palm trees, kitsch 3D postcards from the 50s, the airbrushed perfection of Adam and Eve sits perfectly with the children's scrapbook collages of wild animals playing together happily.
As the Serpent enters the scene, twisting its way round the Tree of Life, offering Eve the forbidden fruit, the Garden starts to die. Autumn which had never entered The Garden before, now makes an appearance, and the leaves begin to fall from the Tree of Life. In the last panel, acid green palms are replaced by dead twigs, the butterflies by Death Head Moths, ferns by vicious pitcher plants.
The very artificial and stylised look of the mural was influenced by the artist's love of kitsch, things that litter his flat like plastic roses, taxidermied animals and photos by Pierre et Gilles.
Laird is a self-taught make-up artiste and also has a clothing label which again is inspired by images of disposable pop culture and by his roots in club culture. Laird often makes one-off outfits for clubbing, and this fed back into the idea of making limited editions prints on T Shirts that are all led by his seductive, humorous and tongue-in-chic vision.
Gregor currently holds a day job as the in-house Graphic Designer for the Edinburgh branch of Harvey Nichols.