Dr Paul Laidler

Qualifications:

BA, MA, PhD

Position:

Senior Lecturer in BA Illustration

Department:

Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)

Telephone:

+441173284988

Email:

Paul.Laidler@uwe.ac.uk

Social media:

About me

Paul Laidler is an artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Illustration at UWE Bristol. His practice works across printmaking, generative AI and graphic interventions in public and institutional spaces, investigating how materials and technologies shape what artefacts are able to remember, reveal or conceal.

His work draws on poetic design and an interest in how materials, processes and tools carry meaning, using graphic practice to open up questions rather than solve problems. He treats making as a method of enquiry rather than a means of representing ideas formed elsewhere, working in the spaces between original and copy, analogue and digital, human and machine.

This enquiry is rooted in print. Printmaking introduced him to repetition, mediation and technology-led production as creative conditions rather than technical stages. Underlying his work is an interest in how humans and technologies coalesce. The tools and systems we design carry utopian hopes of extending us, yet they can also diminish us, acting as a pharmakon, both remedy and poison. Rather than settling this, he attends to the honest artifice and faithful errors that machines leave in their wake. Science and technology call these artefacts, contaminants that get in the way of the truth, but he reads them as the humanities would, as evidence of the human condition.

Research Themes

His current project, To Live Is to Be Haunted, after Philip K. Dick, uses science fiction and graphic practice to investigate generative AI. Haunting here describes a period of transition. The past is reanimated through prompts, remakes and synthetic images, while we begin to contemplate the absence of human activity where it once was. The project is less concerned with who made an image than with how this moment unsettles the assumptions we hold about ourselves and the value we place on our work and interactions. Working through dialogue with machines, speculative publications and site-based installation, it asks whether a machine can be a creative partner, what failure and the unresolved might offer, and how the places an artefact occupies shape what it comes to mean.

The project extends research that began with his PhD on the role of the Master Printer in the digital age. The PhD argued that printers, software, materials and technical processes actively shape creative outcomes, unsettling traditional ideas of authorship.

He co-founded CFPR Editions, UWE Bristol's fine art print publishing studio, which operates as both a professional workshop and a research laboratory for collaboration between artists, printers, designers and digital technologies. Two REACT (Research & Enterprise in Arts & Creative Technologies) grants extended this work into digital publishing, app technologies and new models for printed matter. Earlier touring exhibitions and international print exchanges carried these questions into post-digital graphic practice.

His research moves between studio work, publishing, exhibition, writing and teaching, treating each as a different way of testing ideas and putting them before an audience. The work carries the argument itself. A publication can make a speculative case, an installation can pose a question and a prompt can become an object of study.

Teaching

He teaches across BA and MA programmes and supervises PhD students. On BA Illustration he leads modules that use speculative design, investigative drawing and material experimentation to explore technological futures, cultural memory and material storytelling. He welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD researchers working with print, graphic practice and technology.

Area of expertise

His expertise spans printmaking and collaborative print publishing, expanded graphic practice, generative AI in artistic practice, site-based work and practice-based research. Print shapes how he approaches all of these. He treats the edition as an original multiple and the copy as a creative act in its own right, and carries these ideas into speculative publications and prompt-based artefacts that extend a project’s fiction into the world.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain. He has developed research exchanges and residencies with institutions including the University of Texas at Austin and the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, Poland. He is Associate Editor of Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (Intellect) and has served as External Examiner for programmes including Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore.

Publications

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